Showcasing Bridge Liberia’s Education Transformation Successes at Innovation Africa 2022

Major
education projects, skills development and the upsurge in investments
leveraging technology for education were the main focus of Africa’s number one
high-level ministerial forum Innovation Africa from the 16th to 18th November
2022 in Lusaka, Zambia. This 10th anniversary edition of the summit was held
under the patronage of the Government of the Republic of Zambia and led by the
President, Mr. Hakainde Hichilema.

Hundreds of government ministers and officials
traveled  across the continent to attend the summit  including the
Liberia Minister of Education, Hon. Prof. Ansu Sonii alongside Assistant
Education Minister for Early Childhood Development, Thelma Nimmo.

This high-level Liberia delegation along with
counterparts from at least 24 other African countries engaged with other
stakeholders on topics key to the education agenda of the summit.

Among the topics covered at Innovation Africa
was digital transformation across Africa’s education sector, teacher training,
digital strategies for school leaders, technology innovation and solutions for
improving school connectivity and curriculum reforms.

The focus on education in this year’s event is
pivotal to the learning poverty crisis currently faced in Africa and beyond. A
situation so serious it is a key focus of the UN Secretary General Antonio
Guterres, particularly in the area of foundational learning, main theme of The
Education Summit (TES) ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in
September 2022 culminating in UNICEF leading a new Call To Action
on education. The Innovation Africa summit education rich agenda provides an
opportunity for African countries to fulfill this call to action, which is key
as the learning poverty has become even more pronounced in post pandemic
Africa.

Case in point, our Liberian delegation is
attending this conference against a backdrop of Liberia  being one of the
countries in the word with the highest levels of dropped-out school children, with an estimated 15
percent not in class. Meanwhile, just over 54 percent of children complete
primary education (UNICEF). According to an ONCHA Report, over 15,000 Liberia children were in the streets performing
different forms of child labor, from street hawking to bus conductor among
others. The case is even worse for children in Early Childhood. Under a
third of 3-to-5 year-olds benefit from early childhood education (ECE), and
overage enrollment is common. Nearly 50 per cent of students enrolled in ECE
are 6 years of age or above. Many learners start ECE late and subsequently do
not enter primary school until they are 8 to 10 years old, according to UNICEF on the situation of Liberia Children Report.

Liberia is not alone in this situation, as a
result of the worst shock to education and learning in recorded history,
learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries,
with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written
text, according to a new report published by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, UK
government Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), USAID, and the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This rate was 57% before the pandemic, but
now the learning crisis has deepened. This generation of students now risks
losing $21 trillion in potential lifetime earnings in present value, or the
equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP, up from the $17 trillion estimated in
2021.

This report, The State of Global Learning
Poverty: 2022 Update also tasks countries on the need to concentrate their
efforts on the most cost-effective approaches to tackle learning poverty. It
states that these interventions must be implemented as part of a national
learning recovery program that can also serve as a springboard for building
more effective, equitable, and resilient education systems. Dr. Benjamin Piper,
Director of Global Education, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was quoted as
saying “…we have solutions that can work at scale and in government systems.
Committing to substantial learning recovery programs is a start, but the
composition of those programs matter: measure learning outcomes, but also
invest in improving instruction through structured pedagogy…”

In Liberia, based on these suggestions, there
are bright glimmers of hope for effective scalable education transformation as
seen through the Liberia Education Advancement Program (LEAP), with Bridge
Liberia as the Government of Liberia largest partner in the program. Through
LEAP, the Governments of Liberia has committed to driving up standards and
outcomes across the education systems, with measured gains in literacy and
numeracy in weeks.

The program is supported by data-driven technology
solutions in partnership with NewGlobe, a social enterprise which supports
national and state governments by creating powerful technology-enabled
education systems.

Bridge Liberia is currently supporting over
300 public primary schools and improving learning outcomes through system
transformation for over 75,000 students in Liberia. The impact of this support
shows in  numerous randomized control studies conducted to measure the
impact of the program. The Learning in Liberia Year 3 study shows that eighty-one per cent of students
who joined a Bridge Liberia supported school under the LEAP program in the
first grade and have now spent 2½ years in a Bridge Liberia supported classroom
are proficient or basic readers; compared to only 33% of students in
traditional public schools.

Bridge Liberia focuses on teacher training and
leverages technology to empower teachers and improve children’s learning
outcomes, through intensive training, ongoing support, scientifically-based
digital teacher guides, positive classroom management techniques and real-time
monitoring of lessons.

 

The combination of structured pedagogy with the gathering
of real-time data for accountability and feedback, is one recommended by the
World Bank, as governments everywhere deal with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic,
and the school closures which accompanied it, on children’s education.

This holistic learning methodology was the
subject of a 2-year study led by 2019 Nobel Prize winning professor Michael
Kremer. The Kremer Study finds that NewGlobe methods deliver unequivocal major
learning gains across every academic year in NewGlobe-supported schools,
compared with other schools. These are particularly large in the “key grades”
for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN), primary classes One and Two.
Kremer and his co-authors found that students in early childhood years
supported by NewGlobe received the equivalent of an additional year and a half
of learning in two years.

Author

  • M-News Africa

    M-News Africa is an online magazine that reports trending issues, politics, tourism, investigative reporting, Environmental, Marine Ecosystem, Human Rights, Human Interest and other cross-cutting issues. Contact us: +231 775 552 553; editor@mnewsafrica.com; info@mnewsafrica.com; Carey and Center Streets Intersection, Monrovia

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About M-News Africa 754 Articles
M-News Africa is an online magazine that reports trending issues, politics, tourism, investigative reporting, Environmental, Marine Ecosystem, Human Rights, Human Interest and other cross-cutting issues. Contact us: +231 775 552 553; editor@mnewsafrica.com; info@mnewsafrica.com; Carey and Center Streets Intersection, Monrovia