To galvanize global, regional and national efforts to support the achievement of priority education reforms, GPE taps into and deploys the vast expertise of the partnership and helps reinforce countries' capacity for system transformation.
Through these partnerships, countries can receive on demand technical assistance to tackle complex cross-sectoral challenges impeding the achievement of education outcomes.
Child well-being as a driver of education system transformation
Multiple partner countries are affected by cross-sectoral challenges that impede children's learning.
Child well-being is crucial to positive education outcomes. Children's experience of gender discrimination, chronic hunger, violence in and around schools, climate risks, and the disadvantage of a growing digital divide pose unique challenges for education ministries.
Due to their complex nature with origins and solutions in multiple sectors, these challenges are not easily addressed by education ministries alone.
By working in partnership at the intersection of education and child well-being, GPE takes a comprehensive approach to improve the conditions that make education successful.
Learning and adapting to inform scaling
Technical assistance initiatives offer a new way for GPE to mobilize partners and an opportunity to learn from and adapt these approaches as they are piloted.
All initiatives integrate strong monitoring, evaluation and learning activities to enable GPE to understand their impact and incorporate potential improvements.
Pilot countries have been identified based on their potential to help generate learning for the wider partnership.
Efforts have been made to ensure geographic diversity and inclusion of countries with high capacity as well as fragile or conflict-affected contexts.
Learning from the pilots is supported through cross-country exchange, webinars, and discussion at key convening moments.
An evaluation of the technical assistance portfolio is planned for 2025, to inform the future direction of these initiatives in the next strategic period.
Current initiatives
Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative
Partners: Save the Children and UNESCO and UNESCO-IIEP
Objective: Enhance countries' capacities to mainstream climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability into education sector plans, budgets and strategies, as well as enhance education ministry capacity for cross-sectoral coordination on climate and environment-related policy and programming.
Pilot initiatives
These four new initiatives are piloting support in 2024, with initial results informing consideration to scale them to additional countries.
Gender Equality Initiative
Partners: Gender at the Center Initiative, UNGEI and UNESCO-IIEP
Objective: Reinforce country capacity to mainstream gender equality in and through the education system.
Pilot countries: The initiative, beginning in mid-2024, will support efforts in Chad and Côte d’Ivoire.
Building on the Gender at the Center Initiative’s first phase, this will be done through strengthening the capacity of education ministries and national education actors to develop and implement gender-responsive education sector policies, plans and budgets; and strengthening capacity of education ministries, local education groups, civil society and young activists to engage actively in inclusive dialogue on gender-transformative education.
The menu of support available to participating countries includes:
- Production and use of data and evidence for gender-responsive policy making
- Guidance on gender-transformative approaches in sectoral analysis, planning and budgeting
- Strengthening leadership skills to advance gender-transformative education
- Facilitating civil society and youth engagement in gender-responsive education dialogue.
Safe Learning Initiative
Partners: Safe to Learn Coalition
Objective: The objective of the Safe Learning Initiative is to build country capacity to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools.
Pilot countries: The initiative, beginning in April 2024, is supporting efforts in Nepal and Sierra Leone.
The options for support include:
- Technical capacity to ensure national policies and legislative frameworks embed violence prevention and response in education sector planning, budgeting, reporting and monitoring
- Advisory services to strengthen prevention and response at the school level
- Guidance on the use of social and behavior change approaches to address drivers of violence in schools and enable a supportive learning environment.
- Support to education ministries at the national and subnational levels to strengthen budgeting and costing, and development of results indicators for violence prevention and response
- Support country capacity to generate and learn from evidence on the prevalence and drivers of violence against children, and what works to address it.
School Nutrition Technical Assistance Facility
Partners: School Meals Coalition and World Food Programme
Objective: Reinforce national capacity to implement increasingly sustainable, gender-responsive and nationally owned school meal programs, providing schoolchildren with safe, diverse, nutritious foods that are locally purchased.
Pilot countries: The initiative will support efforts in Kenya and Lesotho once the design phase is complete.
This initiative aims to ensure that:
- Countries have increased sustainable financing to implement school meal policies and programs.
- Countries have improved (costed) policy and legal frameworks for national school meal programs.
- Countries have improved the implementation of locally grown and purchased food for school meal programs that enable multisectoral coordination, complementary activities and monitoring.
- Evidence and learning from other countries are increasingly used to strengthen and consolidate national school meal programs.
Technology for Education Initiative
Partner: UNICEF in consortium with the EdTech Hub
Objective: The Tech4Ed initiative will offer targeted on demand support to countries with the intent of scaling up technology for education as identified in partnership compacts and beyond, and a more thorough assessment and integration of technology in education strategic and operational plans. Opportunities for evidence-based learning and peer exchange and learning will be privileged; and it is expected that cross-sectoral coordination on ICT, including Ministry of ICT or country equivalent, private sector and non-profit EdTech actors, development partners engaging on EdTech will be strengthened.
Pilot countries: The initiative, beginning in June 2024, is supporting efforts in Ghana and Tajikistan.
More specifically, the initiative aims to ensure that Ministries of Education (MoE) benefit from:
- Strengthened MoE capacity to identify and leverage technology to improve access, inclusion and learning outcomes
- Strengthened MoE capacity to leverage technology to improve the education systems' effectiveness – policies, data, planning, management, and monitoring
- MoE better positioned to lead and coordinate cross-sectoral Tech4Ed strategies, including policies, programmes, costed Workplans T4E TAI, and resource mobilization
- Continued evidence mobilization of what/how & why tech works for education; and MoEs are equipped to generate and use evidence on how to effectively leverage tech to strengthen education systems