Shifting power and accountability for learning equity: Transformative education system change

• In Event: Learning Equity: Sampling Challenges of Who, What, Where and How?

Proposal

Most African education systems, designed by and for elites and often colonial elites, have been structured to reinforce rather than challenge power dynamics in societies. To ensure that girls and other excluded and marginalized children can be full engaged, can learn, and can use their educations to transform their lives, we must look to change the power structures within the education system.

Our NGO works to strengthen education systems through long term system wide programs in countries like Sierra Leone, Uganda, Tanzania and South Sudan. Building on findings from this system strengthening work and also work to increase the enrolment, retention and learning of girls in particular, we have developed a “Gender System Strengthening Model” that captures how change happens.

This model recognizes that understanding the “where” of learning equity work requires becoming truly inclusive, transformative and equitable. It must look at who does what, who gets what, who sets the agenda and, ultimately, where in the educational system accountability resides. Shifts in these areas towards greater power in the hands of the users of the systems – the children, their parents and their communities, and in the hands of those on the frontlines, the teachers and school leaders who are delivering education, is fundamental for truly effective and inclusive systems change.

In sum, this paper examines the lessons learned from our work in sub-Saharan Africa to reveal where power has shifted and impacts on learning equity.

Author

• Khadijah A Fancy, Cambridge Education