November 2020 Update
Rising On Air is a top 100 global innovation for 2021.
We're proud to announce that Rising On Air, the distance learning solution via radio which we developed in response to the covid crisis, has been named one of the top 100 global innovations 'changing the face of education in 2021' by hundrED. Every year, hundrED chooses the highest impact ideas from thousands it receives from organisations around the world, and this year Rising On Air was one of them. Rising On Air is a 20 week programme of language arts and maths lessons for five different age groups, designed for delivery over radio. It has been used by more than 35 partners across 25 countries, translated into a dozen languages, and reached more than 12 million children during the pandemic. Huge congratulations to the Rising team and to our partners around the world who all worked so hard on this for this recognition.
Back to school
As schools in our region slowly return to something approaching normality - schools in Sierra Leone reopened last month; schools in Liberia and Ghana are partially open and will re-open fully in the next couple of months - we're excited to be launching a new collaboration with ID Insight. The focus is on understanding and tackling barriers to school re-enrollment for girls across our three operating countries post-covid.
Along with the RCT of our covid response in Sierra Leone being led by the team at CGD, we're excited to be building the global evidence basis about educational responses to covid and its aftermath.
Two upcoming events for your diary
On Thursday November 19th at 930am EST Rising's George Cowell is joining Dr Amel Karboul, CEO of the Education Outcomes Fund, along with leaders and experts from the Government of Liberia, the World Bank and the UN for a Brookings Institution panel on "Public-Private Partnerships in Education at a Time of Crisis: Lessons from Liberia and around the globe".
On Monday November 23rd at 2pm GMT, I'm joining Jacqueline Novogratz, bestselling author, impact investing pioneer and founder and CEO of Acumen Fund for a conversation about "Quality education for a quality life", hosted by Iqbal Khan from UBS as part of their 'Unfiltered' series.
And finally...
Last month we graduated our first ever class of senior high school students. It was a big milestone for us. This was the cohort that six years ago found the start of their secondary schooling disrupted by Ebola. This year, the end of their secondary schooling was disrupted by Covid.
This is a special group of students, and I took to Twitter to tell the story of one of them.
