Transforming Education Through Technology: Save the Children's Growing Portfolio of EdTech Programming and Evidence of Impact

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Advances in technology have transformed the global education space, and offered new opportunities for development partners working to enhance their efforts in promoting learning for all. Guided by our dedication to improving educational outcomes for underserved regions, Save the Children's has been seizing on these opportunities by integrating existing technologies into our education programs through strategic partnerships, as well as developing our own innovative digital platforms. Our commitment to equity, inclusivity and accessibility inform our work to ensure that the benefits of EdTech are extended to the most vulnerable children around the world.

We are leveraging digital platforms across continents to expand access to education were traditional education infrastructure may be lacking or there are particular barriers because of discrimination or gender bias, to enhance the learning experience by making it more interactive, engaging and tailored to their needs, and to provide education continuity in the face of natural disasters, conflicts or public health emergencies. These include education platforms that are designed to be used directly by children, as well as tools that work with families and communities to support learning and wellbeing at home. We also use technology to support teacher and facilitator professional development and enhanced pedagogical approaches in the classroom and at a distance. Finally we leverage digital platforms to support enhanced school information management systems that allow administrators and teachers to track and understand key metrics trends, and formulate responses that improve education quality. Whether as supplements to existing Education programs for those already in school systems, or as dedicated EdTech initiatives, our use of technology has have expanded access to quality education in some of the most marginalized communities in the world.

As part of our commitment to data-driven decision making, we monitor and evaluate our EdTech programs and where possible conduct rigorous research to understand their impact on our beneficiaries. This helps us to continuously improve and tailor our interventions to better serve the needs of children and communities we support. It has also allowed us to collect a growing body of evidence on the impact of our use of technology on key outcomes such as attendance and drop-out rates, gender inclusivity, student engagement, and student learning outcomes in numeracy, literacy and social emotional learning.

This proposal is for a four speaker panel that explores the varied experience of Save the Children education staff making use of technology to overcome challenges in student learning, teacher professional development, and education management information systems in developing countries and emergency settings. It combines on the ground learnings from practice in three country contexts, as well as presenting original research on the impact that these programs are having for school administrators, teachers and students. The first speaker sets the scene with an overview of EdTech modalities and ways of working at Save the Children, and a scan of the available research on our programming in developing countries and emergency settings. The following three speakers share their on the ground experiences rolling out different modalities of EdTech in Pakistan, Uganda and the Philippines, and the evidence that has been generated to show how effective these interventions have been. In doing so, this panel makes important contributions to the topic of Information and Communication Technologies for Development by bringing together a range of evidence from practice and research to respond to common questions related to identifying an education challenge, procuring or developing a technological solution to respond to this problem, testing and refining the product, managing implementation rollout, assessing impact, and adapting and scaling to new contexts after initial success.

Our first speaker will provide an overview of the key areas where our use of education technology has grown in response to and after the COVID-19 pandemic, how we partner and collaborate with other organizations and donors, how we develop our own digital platforms in-house, and our guiding strategy that informs resource allocation and decision making around the use of education technology that consider equity, impact and cost-effectiveness. They will also showcase the range of evidence we have been collecting on the impact of these programs, and emerging trends we are seeing on the benefits for those we serve. To bring this to life, we will then hear from representatives from three of our field offices in Pakistan, Uganda and the Philippines – who will tell us about their experiences implementing EdTech programs and the results that have been generated. We first hear from the Learning Tree project in Pakistan, which has had success supporting girls access quality education through the development of teacher and student-facing learning applications designed specifically for low-resource and emergency settings. We then hear from the Uganda team, whose Enable Education initiative has been utilizing mobile-friendly training materials that utilize interactive voice responses (IVR) to support teacher professional development. Finally, we hear from the Waliku team, who developed an education information management system platform that has supported improved tracking and monitoring of key student metrics and background factors that has improved responses to student absenteeism and dropout.

Sub Unit

• Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) SIG

Chair

• Thomas Brown, Save the Children

Individual Presentations

• EdTech at Save Children since the COVID-19 pandemic: Practice and Evidence from across the movement - Sara Renee Cohen, Save the Children US

• Learning Tree: A remote learning platform increasing education access and continuity in low resource, emergency and migratory settings - Babar Khan, Save the Children

• Enable Education and Waliku: The use of technology in education system strengthening in low resource settings - Mohini Venkatesh, Save the Children US; IGNATIUS TEBUKOZA, Save the Children (Uganda)