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For families of deaf children, a lifelong learning journey has its many challenges. Parents struggle to communicate with their children amidst feelings of isolation, frustration, and misunderstanding in and outside the home. eKitabu’s GPE KIX research, Scaling Inclusive Early Learning with Deaf Learners, has a deliberately experimental component of family dynamics.

With Royal Dutch Kentalis, which has been doing work in deaf education for 235 years, eKitabu designed and held two weeks of workshops in Nairobi that involved deaf teachers, parents of deaf children, and colleagues from Rwanda and Malawi to open ways into working together.

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Read more about the project.

This Save the Children blog from November 2024 introduces the Save the Children Report “Missing Futures”.

“The ongoing conflict in Gaza, occupied Palestinian territory, has inflicted unprecedented and potentially irreversible harm on Palestinian children, with consequences that threaten not only their individual futures but the very fabric of Palestinian society for generations to come. To safeguard these children’s futures and prevent further irreparable damage, urgent and comprehensive action from the international community is needed.”

Read the blog and download the report.

UKFIET has published an article about the November 2024 conference with a summary report. The event brought together Palestinian academics, UK-based educators, and experts to discuss the devastating impact of the ongoing genocide on Gaza’s education system. The conference aimed to explore the destruction of Gaza’s universities and schools and to propose actionable solutions to support recovery efforts. The conference also highlighted the historical context of the destruction of Palestinian education and focused, in its second part, on the broader crisis in Gaza’s schools, with a discussion on the international community’s role in addressing the crisis.

Read the article and summary report.

There are a number of well-known factors that work to constrain a girl’s ability to meaningfully attend, participate in and complete school. Although the occurrence and degree of these factors varies by context, they are all underpinned by one thing: social norms. Given the spectrum of norm acceptance amongst individuals, a nuanced and holistic approach is needed.

This blog published by “Level the Field” examines some of the issues with tackling norms and shifting thinking and action. It also suggests a potential pathway for change:

“In a systematic review of interventions designed to shift behaviour, Stewart et al., (2021) found that there is a problematic and implicit theory of change around shifting participants’ attitudes by increasing their knowledge and awareness of gender norms, and the assumption that this will then lead to behaviour change. Although knowledge and awareness are important, given the structures that entrench norms, the spectrum of acceptance amongst individuals, and the powerful reward and sanctioning mechanisms that abound, a more nuanced approach to behaviour change is required.”

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This UKFIET blog identifies strong capabilities among communities towards developing and sustaining their own educational provision. Local NGOs have been innovating for years on educational provision that can serve children in under-resourced areas. Accelerated education has been one of such innovations which has proven to be effective at enhancing foundational skills in literacy and numeracy.

Evidence shows that it supports transitions into primary and junior secondary schools and that once in formal school, the progress for the majority of children who experienced accelerated learning is similar to that of children who have been attending government schools.

In this blog, the authors provide some of the key findings that have emerged from their research on Accelerated Education Programmes (AEPs) in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, supported by GPE/KIX/IDRC over the last 5 years.

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This INEE blog summarises insights from the research programme ‘Decolonising Knowledge Systems’.

Specifically, it focuses on the field of education of forced migrants and the rise and quick growth of the field over the past 20 years. It looks to uncover patterns in knowledge production, examining the role of colonial legacies and how they manifest in the type of knowledge produced — and how the knowledge is produced.

This blog presents the main features of the knowledge produced in the field of forced displacement, namely: the depoliticisation, the influence of Western humanitarianism, and unequal voices between the Global North and the Global South.

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Teenage pregnancy and early childbearing are leading causes of girls dropping out of schools, and often result in increased health risks, social stigma and adverse economic impacts throughout the course of their lives.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest regional rate of adolescent pregnancy in the world – discriminatory policies, gaps in the implementation of laws, lack of family support, childcare, school fees, negative social norms, and stigma are barriers that deter girls’ continuation in and re-entry to formal education.

This UKFIET blog discusses lessons from an initiative in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Zimbabwe addressing the challenges faced by pregnant girls and adolescent mothers to access formal education.

Read the blog.