How Can Financial Incentives Improve Student Learning Outcomes?
The growing affordable private schools market in India represents a paradoxical mixture of opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, affordable private schools are supported by a growing network of service providers, who see an opportunity to participate in the fast-growing education market in India and want to play a role in improving educational quality. […]
Libraries as a Space for Self-Actualization in the Refugee Context
The practice of curating libraries can be traced back to 2600 BC while their significance as hubs of knowledge remains uncontested until this day. Libraries, often synonymous with learning, complement existing educational institutions. In situations where these institutions have diminished, particularly for refugee and migrant communities, libraries are becoming a key component of responding to this […]
Championing Girls’ Education and Health with Malaika and the Global Fund
Working with girls is deeply personal to me. Alongside a dedicated team, we founded Malaika in 2007 as a grassroots nonprofit whose mission is to empower girls and communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through education and health programs. Malaika believes in the enormous potential of the Congolese people to bring about […]
Tackling Youth Unemployment with 21st Century Skills
In 2017, a science teacher at Happy Days Primary and Nursery School in Najjera, Uganda, a town on the outskirts of Kampala, noticed that a large number of her students were missing school due to typhoid. She taught her students about the importance of handwashing in disease prevention but when they asked the school administration […]
The Future of Africa’s Education is in the Hands of African Youth
In 1993, I was a second-grade student at St Paul’s Primary School, one of the top-ranked schools in northern Ghana. I remember clearly the unpainted and overcrowded classroom with limited resources as well as the fact that our teachers rarely showed up. The 2016 USAID report on Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) shows that […]
Leaving No One Behind: Empowering Women Through Education
Sustainable development begins with education which holds the key to achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from healthy families to sustainable communities and peaceful societies. To achieve SDG 5 for gender equality and women’s empowerment we need first and foremost invest our effort in ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting […]
3 Ways Young Women are Transforming a Continent
By 2100, the global population is forecast to stand at over 11 billion1, and 4 billion of that number could be Africans2. The current population of sub-Saharan Africa is already well over 1 billion3, with an estimated median age of 194. This youth bulge, caused as child mortality rates fall but birth rates remain […]
To Fix Youth Unemployment in Africa, We Need to Build Skills in the Informal Sector
Unemployment is a silent trauma forging the common experience of my generation, and we are failing to create the conditions to change this reality. Instead, we are confined to a narrative of formal education and formal employment while our reality in Africa is overwhelmingly informal employment. Just like the mustard seed, informal employment grows […]
From Local Program to Global Network: How to Create a Professional Learning Community
During my PhD defense one of the examiners asked me what I would do after my PhD. My answer was that I would go back to Qatar and work with my scholarship provider, Qatar Foundation, to improve schools in Qatar. My PhD isn’t the magic wand to fix our education system however, I do believe […]
Nurturing Young Citizens’ Creativity in Media Use
We are living in a complex world where the rapid technological development of recent decades has brought major changes and challenges. One of the most important of these is the increasing mediatization of our lives: the media is ubiquitous and dominant in our everyday lives. Thanks to the internet, all-powerful companies like Google, Facebook, […]