Event Highlights: IFE-2-Leave No One Behind Workshop on Strengthening Effective Partnerships to Address SDG 4

Tuesday 21^st May 2024

10:30-12:30 CEST

Online

Event Highlights: IFE-2-Leave No One Behind Workshop on Strengthening Effective Partnerships to Address SDG 4

IFE-2-Leave No One Behind research partners Tata Institute of Social Sciences – Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education (TISS-CETE) and NORRAG at the Geneva Graduate Institute recently co-hosted a virtual workshop as a part of the SUDAC & KFPE Annual Conference 2024: Sustainable, Equitable Partnerships in North-South Collaboration – Lessons learned for future funding models. In keeping with KFPE’s goal to promote efficient, effective, and equitable research cooperation between Switzerland and low- and middle- income countries, the conference focused on several topics pertaining to North-South collaboration, including best practices in developing equal partnerships, funding models for collaboration and the design of potential future funding models.

Organised by Archana Mehendale of TISS and Arushi Terway of NORRAG, the IFE-2-Leave No One Behind workshop was titled “Strengthening Effective Partnerships to Address SDG 4: The Role of Impact Bonds in Education”. The workshop focused on learnings from the collaboration between IFE-2-Leave No One Behind research partners and how the joint effort has fostered knowledge exchange and mutual capacity building of experts in both the Global North and Global South. It also highlighted  how partnerships, and in particular research partnerships, contribute to SDG 4. The specific impact bonds used as case studies during the workshop were the Haryana Early Literacy Development Impact Bond, Quality Education India Development Impact Bond (QEI), Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC), and Ghana Education Outcomes Project (GEOP).

In the first part of the workshop, Dr Mehendale and Dr Terway provided an overview of innovative finance in education more broadly, then discussed the specific partnerships involved in the IFE-2-Leave No One Behind project. In addition to highlighting the contributions of each of the different project members, the presentations emphasised the importance of local knowledge in research project development and how researchers should aim to collaborate in building projects jointly with multisectoral partners from the earliest stages in order to incorporate diverse yet collaborative perspectives.

Following the introduction, the participants were distributed  into three breakout rooms where they engaged in guided discussions on one of the three cases of their choice:

1. Quality Education India Development Impact Bond (QEI)
2. Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC) and Ghana Education Outcomes Project (GEOP)
3. Haryana Early Literacy Development Impact Bond

With the goal of improving their understanding of both innovative finance in education and how partnerships contribute towards the success of the work in this field, participants received case briefs on each project and discussed topics ranging from the  education challenge being addressed in the case, critical actors and their roles, the financing mechanism, partnerships and the motivation of actors for engaging in partnerships, and evaluation including expected outcomes and results.

In the Haryana Early Literacy Development Impact Bond group, participants discussed the role of government as a partner and how that has played out in the case given government-mandated corporate social responsibility policies in India. In the QEI group, participants discussed how multi-stakeholder partnership has helped address issues of quality in a country where education is universal, and what downstream effects that may have. In the SLEIC and GEOP group, participants discussed the different roles of different actors involved, their motivations, and how those may affect the intervention.

Participants attended from around the world, with the majority of participants from the Global South. They engaged readily with the material throughout and asked thoughtful questions about how different partnerships have functioned in practice, and how they have contributed to both the interventions and the surrounding research.