Taking education innovations to scale: Challenges and opportunities

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Journey to scale: a digital game based learning approach for children in humanitarian settings

Proposal

Scaling innovations is still a new area of work within the Humanitarian sector, and particularly for Education in Emergencies innovations. The main focus when scaling education innovations is whether they are delivering improved outcomes. However, understanding the key milestones and steps for scaling required by organisations, MoEs and other partners is critical. Scaling an education innovation has some peculiarities that other sectors do not encounter in the same way. This session will explore some of the unique challenges in scaling education innovations, as well as outlining key milestones on the scaling journey.

The UKAID-funded, UNICEF and UNHCR-led Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) is an initiative designed to take on this challenge by supporting the transformation of five, pilot programmes to scaled-up education innovations for conflict-affected populations. Concurrently, the HEA focuses on expanding and strengthening the evidence base of education in emergencies and increasing actors’ understanding of the different factors needed for such a successful transition by identifying drivers of scale up.

As part of the HEA initiative, each programme team receives technical research support from American Institutes for Research (AIR), tailored mentorship on the scale up process, and annual bootcamps to build organisational capacity and enable peer-support. Ian Gray, the HEA mentor will provide insight into scaling across the education in emergencies sector, using Can’t Wait to Learn as an example but drawing on parallels with other programmes both within the education and humanitarian sectors. Hannah Ring, AIR, will contribute to the same theme but from a research perspective. She will discuss the challenges in collecting relevant and high-quality data in low-resource settings that adequately informs scale, and how the different HEA programme teams have mitigated and overcome such challenges.

Authors

• Ian Gray, Gray Dot Catalyst

• Hannah Reeves Ring, American Institutes for Research