Envisioning Education in Africa: What it takes for Children to receive Equitable, Quality Education and prosper in the modern world

• In Event: The Just Society: Collective impact -Bringing Children Furthest behind closer to enjoying the Right to Education in a changing world

Proposal

Education in Africa remains exclusive. The most vulnerable remain excluded. The quality of teaching and learning does not adequately prepare all children with the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to engage in the 21st century economy. Advancement in technology continues to create demand for new competencies to thrive in the modern world. The urgent need for reforms in Public Education to keep pace with the technology revolution cannot not be met by Governments on their own.

The legions of actors that seek to influence change in the Education ecosystem outmatch the capacity of National Governments to keep up to date with the innovations and evidence-based practices on quality teaching and learning; creating islands of evidence and innovations that remain localized.

RELI Africa co-designed a collaborative strategic planning process to rally over 60 CSOs and academic institutions in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda focused to rally education actors behind a common goal fostering inclusive education for all children and build a strong foundation for collective impact on national education systems. The process leveraged principles of distributed leadership that targeted four interconnected layers of decision-making involving; representatives of member organizations at country level, thematic teams[1], Country leadership teams, and the Board of Directors. Dedicated facilitation support was provided at each layer to review the context of public education with a focus on foundational learning, quality of teaching, Inclusiveness of Education systems among others. The representatives of member organizations at country level, thematic teams, Country leadership teams defined specific Context specific priorities and Co-designed Country Strategic Actions that were fully endorsed by relevant stakeholders. The three (3) Country level strategic plans were then synthesized to identify common outcomes and inspire regional collaboration across the countries.

The collaborative strategy design process achieved 3 results that continue to continue to be a challenge in governance of CSO networks; i) Shared Vision and measurement framework to rally members and other education actors, ii) Empowering Country Leadership teams to shape and steer their priorities, iii) Dedicated facilitation at Country level and defined agenda for cross country learning, iv) designing deliberate actions on leveraging data and evidence to inform policy.

Conclusion
The strategy design process provides lessons on how CSO Networks and other actors in the Education Ecosystem can use principles of distributed leadership to rally actors behind a shared vision, foster a collaborative culture, ownership of development results, collective action and accountability

Authors

• Margaret Wawira, Zizi Afrique Foundation

• Peter Magara, RELI Africa