Lessons on Scaling Out an Early Stage EdTech Social and Emotional Learning Intervention

• In Event: The Messy Middle of Implementation at Scale

Proposal

This paper focuses on the experience of an early stage edtech social and emotional learning (SEL) innovation as it scaled up in Bangladesh, Uganda and Greece. The paper will discuss the experiences of scaling up in one context while simultaneously scaling out to new contexts and communities. In particular it highlights the difficulties that lie in the messy middle of implementation at scale and the need to both add complexity to an innovation while scaling up in the same context and remove complexity while scaling out to new contexts (McClure and Gray 2019). Importantly, the paper will discuss a key strategy for the organization during this period which was to build up its network of stakeholders, champions, and change agents (Rogers 2003), which enabled it to make desired program and evaluation modifications and scale to new locations.

Founded in 2017, Amal Alliance is an NGO dedicated to empowering children through education and social development programs. Its flagship SEL program, Colors of Kindness, is an easy to implement blended learning program that includes a podcast series and digital workbook. Requiring minimal teacher training, it can be implemented in crisis and conflict-affected and low-resource settings.

SEL refers to the process through which children acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that help them understand themselves, connect with others, and contribute to a more compassionate and equitable world. SEL contributes to improved emotional well-being and mental health, prosocial behaviors and healthy relationships, as well as academic achievement (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2023). High-quality SEL programming has been shown to improve outcomes for all children, and may be particularly beneficial for vulnerable children (Gedikoglu, 2021), who are the group of children Amal Alliance’s programs support.
The robust network that Amal Alliance built which included partnerships with UNHCR and private foundations led to opportunities to scale its programs to new contexts. By leveraging its network and forging new partnerships, the organization took its program from Bangladesh to Uganda and then Greece. Its efforts to date have benefited over 276,000 students and its internal evaluations have shown positive impacts on families and teachers (LEAP, 2023). If given the opportunity to repeat the scaling process, the organization would prioritize seeking funding earlier to conduct external evaluations, which were deemed essential as the program scaled.

The experiences of Amal Alliance demonstrate relevance to CIES for its focus on scaling to three widely different locations and contexts, offering experiences of both how the program needed to be modified in each context by adding and removing complexity, and also how the organization navigated the global humanitarian education landscape to evaluate its programs, build new contacts, and secure adequate funding for its programs to reach scale. The paper offers to share the organization’s experiences with other education organizations that have moved beyond the initial pilot phase but are still in the implementation stage, facing the challenges of the messy middle.

Author

• Danielle De La Fuente, Amal Alliance