Education Innovation Alliance Report Launch

Pakistan is the second country in the world with the highest number of children who do not go to school. According to a 2012 report by Education for All Global monitoring, about a quarter of the 19.75 million children in Pakistan aged five to nine are out of school. If the age bracket is increased to include adolescents, then about 25 million are not enrolled in school, out of a total school-going population of about 45 million. Almost two-thirds of the poorest girls in Pakistan have never been to school. The long term neglect of education means that the poorest young women in the country have only spent around a year in school on average. Without a real step change by the government to give these children and young people the education and training they need, including a second chance for those who have missed out, they will be denied equal opportunities in work and life forever.  

 

These hard-core realities have always inspired and informed the Developyst team’s core philosophy and been the driving force behind our flagship incubation, the Data-Platform. While the Data-Platform will help us realize the dream of a Pakistan with a much improved education landscape, where innovation and advocacy are not only prominent but also effective features, the team has always been aware of the fact that these phenomena cannot take place in the absence of a space that enables connection and re-connection of people and ideas. Innovation cannot happen in isolation and only manifests when ideas are allowed to feed-off each other and undergo a multiplier effect. To address the need of such a space, Developyst helped conceptualize and launch Pakistan’s first Education Innovation Alliance (EIAP).   

The inaugural roundtable, the first of a series, was held on 7th February 2013 and brought together a group of visionaries and top thinkers from the education, financial inclusion and technology sector with the aim of taking positive steps towards ending Pakistan’s education emergency. The panelists included education entrepreneurs, foundations, for-profit investors, educational buyers and consumers, public and private sector representatives, politicians and policymakers.   

This seminal meeting of the Alliance, explored the parallels between the innovation space of the microfinance and education sectors with the aim of extracting some important lessons and best-case practices for the education sector. The main questions asked were: How do we find and inspire education innovators? How do we build an enabling environment? and What, if any, role can performance indicators play in revolutionizing education in Pakistan? A detailed report of the proceedings of the first gathering of the EIAP can be found be downloaded here.  

Inspiring change and innovation in our education systems cannot be viewed as a one-time activity, for which adequate knowledge and skill can be disseminated via one workshop or training session. There is no silver bullet or quick-fix solution and the process will not only be extensive and multi-party centric but also a continuous one. The EIAP will serve as a platform where such continuity can be established. Not only will the forum enable connecting the dots between the efforts of practitioners and education innovators and more efficient and evidence-based policy advocacy, but it will also help address the gap between ground-realities and research by identifying new areas of research.

You can download the full report from here.