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Collaboration is Key: Using Co-Creation of Early-Grade Interventions to Ensure the Right to Education in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Lebanon

Thu, March 14, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Hibiscus A

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The right to education is enshrined in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). This includes free, compulsory primary education and parents’ right to choose the education their children receive. However, having a right does not guarantee it will be delivered or protected. Throughout history individuals have had to fight for their rights, including their right to primary education, mother tongue education, and broader systemic change. Globally, teachers, students, and parents must often protest to secure changes in their teaching and learning environments. But what if that wasn’t necessary? This panel explores how partners, donors, and government officials can use co-creation and collaboration to deliver education that is responsive to the needs of communities and serves as a catalyst for change.

Co-creation can be a notoriously difficult process that may require stakeholders to reimagine relationships, discover new ways to interact and reconfigure roles. But, by shifting power dynamics, co-creation offers the potential to simultaneously reduce costs and increase satisfaction (Gouillart and Hallett 2015). It also increases the likelihood that interventions will be relevant and responsive to community needs, which means collective action may not be required as often. USAID incorporates co-creation throughout the Program Cycle as a tool for developing shared goals and a shared vision for many of the activities that it funds, including in education. The ability to convene diverse stakeholders for co-creation and similar collaborative conversations is something the Agency notes can be even more valuable than the money it invests (Co-Creation: An Interactive Guide, 2022). This panel explores the experiences of government officials, USAID staff, and implementing partners using co-creation as part of their education work in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Lebanon.

The education systems across the three countries have different priorities and face different opportunities and challenges. In Bangladesh, Bangla language is central. This first paper brings together voices from the Government of Bangladesh (GoB), USAID, and Winrock International, the prime implementor of USAID’s Esho Shikhi Activity, and examines how they used co-creation to support Bangla literacy as prioritized in the GoB’s Fourth Primary Education Development Program strategy. In Tanzania, USAID has a long history of supporting basic education, but to effectively work with government counterparts and institutionalize programming, they and their partner RTI adapted processes like work planning and budgeting to better coordinate with the government cycle. As in Bangladesh, they also found that clearly aligning activities to government initiatives improved adoption and perception. In Lebanon, when teacher protests and COVID-19 brought school to a standstill in recent years, research and evidence offered critical data that helped stakeholders jointly adapt and pivot interventions.

Through the three papers, this panel examines similarities and differences in co-creation and collaboration across regional and national contexts as well as stakeholder groups. Presentations will focus on country-level lessons, but the panel will conclude with a broader group discussion that will draw out higher-level learning and ask whether it may be more broadly applicable. Overall, we aim to illustrate how co-creation and collaboration can shift power, level the playing field between stakeholders, and ensure that collective action isn’t required to ensure the right to education.

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