The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 exacerbated many already existing challenges affecting access to education worldwide. At its peak, over 1.6 billion learners globally were affected by school closures, disproportionately impacting children in low- and lower-middle-income countries who were already facing substantial education challenges prior to the pandemic. With 2 trillion hours of in-person schooling lost due to…
In 2021, EdTech Hub partnered with the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government to deliver an executive education programme focused on digital transformation and educational technologies (EdTech). This programme — which convened nearly 30 policymakers from 13 countries — was a miniature community of practice (COP) focused on EdTech reform. In this blog, we introduce key principles to implement…
For three days, between 11 and 13 May 2022, nearly 1,000 participants from over 70 countries spread across Africa and the world joined eLearning Africa’s 15th international conference on ICT in education, training, and skills development (eLA 2022). The conference attracted participants from Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Europe, and the United States of America. This is Africa’s largest…
This blog is the first in a series exploring Raising Readers, an EdTech Hub and Worldreader research project set in Kenya seeking to better understand what drives parental engagement in learning and generate new evidence on what works in terms of learner equity, quality, and cost-efficiency. This blog sets out the human-centered design approach undertaken by Kenyan school officials, parents,…
Are you a government official, NGO or researcher looking to understand what education data is available locally? Our new guidance note shares practical lessons learnt from mapping the availability of education data in Kenya, Malawi, and Sierra Leone. Last year, we posted about the Unlocking Data initiative and its goal to support access, use, and sharing of education data to…
This study sought to understand more about how teachers and school leaders in low and middle-income countries assessed student progress when students were learning remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was undertaken in six countries – Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, and South Africa. The data collection involved focus group discussions with two held in each country. It was…
Educational technologies (EdTech) have been used in a multitude of ways to enable children to gain greater access to impactful and continuous education. At the same time, differences in EdTech use and access, across and within countries, also show that the use of EdTech can contribute to exacerbating long-standing structural inequalities. Consideration of equity is crucial in ensuring that the…
Reflective practice is not just reserved for teachers… it’s the duty of all stakeholders in the field.” Do you know how many academic articles are published each year? A recent study by To and Yu (2020) found that over 3.2 million academic articles were published in 2020 alone. And this only considered publications of researchers from the US, UK, China,…
Historically, the Sierra Leonean government has struggled to attract teachers to work in the most hard-to-reach areas of the country. Today, the country’s education system has one of the highest pupil-to-qualified-teacher ratios in West Africa. The challenge of attracting teachers is most acute for schools in rural locations. Here, the pupil-to-qualified-teacher ratio currently sits at 76:1. This ratio compares to…
At EdTech Hub, we’ve been reflecting on how coloniality is embedded in the work we do: from the colonial roots of the international development sector, to colonial practices embedded in research methods, to “core-to-periphery” design and deployment of EdTech interventions. We’ve just begun this journey, but in trying to embody one of our EdTech Hub values of ‘fearless and humble…