Africa-Press – Kenya. A global summit is scheduled in Paris to deliberate on the funding and ways of transforming the education sector.
The meeting starting this week will bring on board education stakeholders including ministers, policy and business leaders, and youth activists drawn from over 140 countries.
Proceedings at the UNESCO Transforming Education Pre-Summit in Paris will consist of country-led national consultations, global thematic action tracks, and public engagements.
The main summit is scheduled for September in New York, USA.
It will focus majorly on transformations including schools, lifelong quality learning, teachers, connectivity and financing education.
The pre-summit will also provide an open platform for countries to share crucial elements of their resolve to transform education so as to inspire other nations ahead of the main summit.
The US conference aims to provide “a moment for education to take its rightful place on the global stage, at the top of the world’s agenda,” and to reverse the current slide on SDG 4.
At the same time, Bridge International School has been lauded as one of the pioneer learning institutions to embrace a transformational education system during a crisis.
The school has been rolling out technology to provide affordable education targeting children from humble backgrounds.
For instance, the school developed an innovative remote learning centre christened [email protected] which kept children engaged for months while schools were closed for almost a year.
Prof Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago and his team of researchers found that primary school pupils in Bridge are nearly a whole additional year of learning ahead of children taught using standard methods.
For pre-primary pupils, children gain nearly an additional year and a half of learning.
They learn in two years what children in other schools learn in three and a half years.
The researchers also found that Grade 1 pupils in Bridge were more than three times as likely to be able to read as their peers in other schools.
In addition, they found that pupils starting from the lowest learning levels gained the most, with girls making the same leap in learning as boys.
The system involves the use of WhatsApp and virtual classrooms to deliver content to the students.
“The resources reduced learning disruption and kept children on the path to success,” the school said in a statement.
This is in a line with a 2021 Global Partnership for Education Summit held in London co-chaired by President Uhuru Kenyatta and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The leaders rallied their counterparts to step up efforts to provide transformational education systems embracing digital technology and harnessing its full potential to improve and transform education.
The World Bank has indicated that 70 percent of 10-year-olds, from developing countries, are now in learning poverty.
“They are unable to read and understand a simple text. School closures during the pandemic and unequal mitigation actions have exacerbated the learning inequality among children,” World Bank said.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are affected the most by pandemics, jeopardizing their ability to thrive in increasingly competitive labour markets and more complex societies.
As the world battles the looming learning crisis, a recently released study by a Nobel prize-winning economist seems to offer a way out.
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