Flexible Programming for more Inclusive Education: USAID El Salvador’s Educational Innovation Activity

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Lessons in Literacy: An Analysis of USAID's Investments in Early Grade Reading

Proposal

In 2022, USAID/El Salvador launched the $24.7 million Educational Innovation Activity (EI) in 2022 to address the cycle of poverty affecting Salvadoran children by improving school retention and educational quality.

EI’s objectives are: 1) to improve the foundational skills and psychosocial wellbeing of young learners, particularly the most marginalized and vulnerable youth in targeted geographic areas, and 2) to strengthen the capacity of higher education institutions (HEIs) to better support the basic education (BE) sector. Working with the Salvadoran Ministry of Education (MINED), EI will support at least 350 schools and test interventions with over 50,500 learners in communities with high rates of violence, dropout, and migration. EI will scale up the most successful interventions to reach at least 190,700 students across 840 schools and accelerated learning programs, 1,700 teachers, 300 school directors, 200 technical advisors, and 50 MINED officials.

The EI activity incorporates two of the recommendations from the Early Grade Reading Retrospective: 1) Build flexibility into program design and contract and 2) Make programming more equitable. The presentation will discuss specific examples of how these recommendations were implemented. For example, in order to ensure flexibility, the EI program has built in opportunities for multiple revisions of work plans based on input from key stakeholders. It also stipulates the need for the regular reassessment of the implementing operating environment and adjustment of program planning and execution, applying a proactive management approach. In order to make programming more equitable, EI created a commission to ensure the application of the strategies of UDL and gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) in project activities. EI has also emphasized the crucial role of socioemotional learning and UDL principles and integrated these aspects across all programming.

Although still in the early stage of implementation, EI has already seen progress along the lines of ensuring programming is more equitable and relevant to the context. A key achievement from the first years of implementation in terms of equity was defining a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) strategy with the Ministry of Education. EI has also developed a co-creation process, with the Ministry of Education, for teacher training which will ensure that professional development is both contextually relevant and integrated into the existing system. Thus, EI provides specific and practical examples of how recommendations from the report can be incorporated into programing with the goal of improving learning outcomes for all.

Authors

• Zaid Abuhouran, United States Agency for International Development USAID

• Carmen Maria Henriquez, DDI Center for Education, United States Agency for International Development (USAID)