Adapting to Unpredicted Complexities - Lessons from Nicaragua

• In Event: Champions, Environments, & Incentives: Emerging Lessons from Research on Scaling the Impact of Education Innovations around the World

Proposal

The global investment in improving children’s access to education has been an ongoing effort, but for too many children, especially the most vulnerable, it has failed to ensure quality learning. This is in partly due to constraints that continue to limit children’s access to education. To respond to this challenge, World Vision (WV), with a consortium of academic partners, is researching how holistic networks of literacy programs can inform innovative, scalable, and sustainable solutions to early grade literacy, assessment inform systems, and national education policies in Ghana, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Unlock Literacy (UL), the education innovation which the ROSIE project is studying, is a comprehensive approach that goes beyond the formal classroom to reinforce children’s literacy skills at home, in community-based reading camps, and through increased exposure to print materials. The Unlock Literacy Learning Networks (ULLN) research provides evidence on factors that enable and hinder collaborative stakeholder networks that aim to advance quality, sustainable, scalable, and effective gender-responsive and inclusive educational programming for early grade students (grades 1-3) to improve children’s literacy levels within vulnerable populations.

One of the core findings from the ROSIE research is the importance of adapting to respond to complex and complicated changes within the enabling environment. The UL team will share examples from their work with UL in Nicaragua, where they have had to adapt to respond to a fragile and changing socio-political context.

For example, several predictable and unpredictable factors have caused multiple delays and complications in the project. First, the government increased scrutiny of funding sources from abroad. As a result, many NGOs have closed, and there have been constant changes in reporting procedures and expectations. These processes continue to burden World Vision Nicaragua and all other CSOs/NGOs with significant bureaucracy and operation costs, resulting in delays. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic and the use of schools as election polling sites have resulted in prolonged school closures, which in turn has hindered authorization processes and data collection at the school level. Third, changes in ministry staff required the building of new relationships. Finally, disruptions from two severe hurricanes temporarily hampered implementation at the community level.

Adaptation is a fundamental and foundational concept within the World Vision scale-up strategy. Despite these impediments, the team tailored and localized adaptations to ensure implementation was maintained across various communities. Contingency plans were developed based on the level and type of program implementation to address the varying local/contextual barriers that resulted from the pandemic and other socio-political factors. With ever-evolving contexts, community stakeholders adapted innovations and found an essential need for continuous engagement. This includes ensuring buy-in, community support, and locally led project contextualization by the community members themselves, which in turn helped facilitate greater ownership of the activities.

During this panel, World Vision researchers will describe the complex partnerships that enable literacy and educational programming to continue during unprecedented times, and share findings on the critical role of teachers, community leaders, volunteers, and government ministries in adapting literacy approaches within local learning systems.

Author

• Liseth Espinoza, World Vision International