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Building a social movement to enable local voice for education transformation in Africa. Lessons from a Regional Education Network.

Wed, March 13, 9:45 to 11:15am, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Hibiscus A

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 focuses on ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. African countries have made slow progress towards achieving quality education for all. The 2022 Africa for Sustainable Development report states that despite considerable improvement in school enrolment, millions of school-age children are not in school and there is need to increase funding for education infrastructure. The report emphasises the need to invest in pre-primary and primary education, training of teachers and digital connectivity as priority areas. Whereas this is documented in the report in the East African region education quality is at risk and calls for collective action to address the persistent challenges.
Protests as we well know have inspired the transformation of many social-inequalities highlighted by key figures such as Gandhi who identified literacy as one of the means to transform society. Martin Luther King (1947) identified the function of education in the life of man and society as a utility and the other as culture. A student of Ghandi, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere saw education as the weapon of choice to fight poverty and ignorance and achieve self-determination and self-reliance for Tanzanians specifically and Africans in general. Many nations today, especially in Africa, continue to toil to make education a functionality that enables man to thrive, be self-determined and transform society.
Different forms of protest are taking place across the globe and African continent to realise the promises of a quality, inclusive and equitable education for the development of individuals and progress of the nations. One such protest is the Regional Education Learning Initiative Africa (RELI Africa). A member driven initiative working to ensure inclusive education for all children in East Africa. The network of like-minded education actors from East Africa, recognizes the gap in equity and quality education and seeks to use its collective voice by leveraging evidence to influence the policy and practice of teaching and learning. Central to RELI’s protest is transformation. Transformation of learning to include values and life skills, transformation of innovative practices to ensure equity and inclusion and teaching and learning, and transformation of organisations into a collective voice. The movement is organised in thematic groups that focus on teacher development, value-based education, and matter policies through a collective voice RELI presents a forum to engage, connect and promote change within the education sector in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
The CIES conference theme on the power of protest aligns with the role of civil societies in shaping the educational policy making process in the developing countries where education management continues to be top heavy with minimal input from district/count actors or consumers. Heavy bureaucratic structures create communication challenges. The proliferation of institutions and structures concerned with learning result in conflict in roles and authority. With the government being more focused in facilitating education access, education governance is an area that civil society assumes prominence specifically in social accountability measures. In this case civil society entities that form RELI have bolstered participation and voice by bringing in the components of innovative teaching and learning models to support learners left behind and contribute to teachers’ continuous professional development.
Education policies constitute the foundation of respective education programmes and outline sectoral plans, objectives, strategies and targets. In this aspect across the region policies are formulated by bureaucrats and forced to education administrators and educators for implementation. RELI is on the move to influence evidence-based policy making processes where a major strategy pursued is promoting the adoption of transformative approaches and practices in education by generating and sharing evidence of models or initiatives that work and are adaptable. For the past five years RELI member organisations have implemented jointly co-created projects with the different stakeholder including the policy makers to encourage evidence-based policy formulation and engaging stakeholder.
Given that social movements are multifaceted and dynamic and vary considerably across contexts and time, there is a need to better understand the wider ecosystem of social movements at national and subnational levels that align with the Joint Programme priorities and ensure more strategic and focused engagement in movement building. The objective of the panel is to share experiences and lessons on building a movement of education actors in East Africa to improve the learning outcomes of children most left behind across the region.
Organised into the three areas of transformation, this panel draws on the lessons learnt, achievements and aspirations of RELI as a voice of those at risk of being left further behind. Each paper will reflect the similar but slightly different experience of each of the 3 RELI countries. The first paper will speak to the journey for moment building of Education focused organisations in East Arica. The second paper will unpack the power of catalysing Collaboration among civil society organisations towards achieving quality learning for the furthest left behind. The third and fourth paper examines the transformational impact of grass-root organisations in creating change in local communities.

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