By Ibrahim Joenal Sesay
FREETOWN, July 29 (232News) – EducAid and their partners have ended a day Education Innovation Challenge (EIC) learning workshop which brought service providers together.
The day workshop which took place at Sierra Palm over the weekend saw EducAid, Rising Academy Network, Save the Children and World Vision sharing ideas, and implementation to know the things that went wrong and the one that were right and what they have learnt from the data collected.
“It’s all about sharing ideas, so the EducAid could learn from the other four service providers, and the other four service providers could learn from EducAid,” said Joseph M. Kai, EducAid Education Coordinator and current Lead Project Manager for EIC project.
This is the second EIC year 2 learning workshop EducAid is undertaking and it through the support of the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education.
Giving an overview of the project, Joseph said it started back when the current Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Dr. David Sengeh was acting as the Chief Innovation Officer for DSTI, he thought it fit that he wanted people that have ideas that could change the dynamics of education in the country, through that he shared invitation of a project for people to apply and his organization and other four organizations applied and were able to be selected to run the project.
“The project has been running for the second year now. it’s a two-year project, and the results and findings of the project will be cascaded in other schools, we really want to see a system that will be used in schools, making changes, this is a test case. When we see what the results of the test case will be like, we will think of extending it to other places,” he confirmed.
He pointed out that when they started the project, they encountered lots of challenges such as communication, teachers accepting them, the community, the geographical location of the projects, people understanding the project and collaborating with other districts stakeholders.
He furthered that community engagement is one of their success stories, noting that as the project is ending next year, they want to see it being sustainable.
Programme Manager for National Youth Awareness Forum, George Foday who is one of the service providers for the education challenging projects working across Bonthe which covered 30 schools in that district stated that their intervention, focus on three outcomes, strengthening together competence in pedagogy, and good content, and working with school leaders to strengthen their leadership capacity to effectively manage the schools and that the third outcome is to increase community relationship with schools and community support.
Chairman, Teaching Services Commission (TSC), Conrad Sackey described the project as unique in the sense that for several years, government has been investing in the learning outcomes of young people, but that the problem has always been that they don’t have any evidence that the investments are making any returns with those projects.
Certificates were distributed to EducAid Cluster Mentors and Teacher Coaches for their work in the field, they described them as heroes because of their efforts, time and energy of going to the remotest areas.
