Equality, Trust and Vision: 20 Years of Collaboration in Zambia

• In Event: Getting there: Achieving scale and sustainability through long-term investment and a commitment to iterative, incremental growth

Proposal

In 1999, USAID Zambia awarded EDC $75,000 in unsolicited funds to pilot the concept of using Interactive Radio Instruction to reach Zambia’s out-of-school population. Over time that nascent effort grew, attracted more funding, and was mandated with more complex tasks. Almost 20 years later we have accumulated the experiences and lessons-learned that constitute a roadmap of how to sustainably integrate high-quality programming into government systems and, simultaneously, into the national patterns of community life. In this presentation we will provide an overview of these insights.
The initial investment by USAID allowed us to train Ministry of Education scriptwriters, encourage the community development of 20 non-formal learning centers, and distribute audio programming. This resulted in a new total of 3 national school types: formal schools in areas with established infrastructure, community schools (which totaled under 200 nationwide) in communities who could self-organize their own infrastructure and instruction (Chondoka & Subulwa, 2004) and our 20 learning centers in communities who started by designating a meeting-place for learning. Over the next two decades the number of learning-centers expanded rapidly and evolved in quality, peaking at almost 3,000 in 2009, and becoming recognized as formal community schools in their own right. This startling growth attracted the attention of the formal system partly because community learners were matching the learning achievements of government school pupils (despite the community school’s lack of basic materials and formally trained or paid teachers), and partly because their attendance rose to encompass almost one third of national school enrollment.
With the attention of the formal sector, and with sustained and generous support from USAID, over the years EDC expanded our services to extend programming support into formal schools, to help government provide bridging services to slowly integrate community schools into the formal sector, and to support the community’s shift in focus from opening new schools to the ever-evolving task of raising quality in schools they had established. These efforts lead to a tripling of literacy skills between 2012 and 2015 (Time to Learn Final Evaluation, 2016), a quadrupling of services extended to community schools by government between 2012 and 2014 (Frischkorn & Falconer-Stout, 2016) and the historic provision of the first budget line-item for community schools in the Ministry of General Education’s 2016 budget.
These successes were made possible by learning key lessons: the value of fostering and harnessing grass-roots support for initiatives, the crucial importance of allowing government staff to control the production of technical products at co-established levels of quality, the value of producing high-visibility programming that resonates with the every-day citizen, the art of supporting needs without stifling community initiative, the indispensable advantaged gained from aligning and leveraging the likeminded efforts of civil society groups of all kind, the principles of instructional design that dictate the effective and affordable use of instructional technology at scale and, most of all, an approach to successfully earn the trust of government institutions that is foundational to sustained impact.

Author

• Jennifer Kennedy, Education Development Center