Covid-19 has now been disrupting our partner education systems in India and Uganda for more than 16 months. Schools have remained closed for most or all of this period in each geography, which has had a very significant impact on our ability to reach officials, teachers and children through our work.
At STiR, our first instinct was to engage with our partner governments and identify areas where we could support with their wider response to the pandemic, while planning for the resumption of our programme. But after the first couple of months, it became clear that we needed to find new ways to engage teachers and officials and add value for governments. Our programme teams have now been delivering their Covid response activities for a full year, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share their reflections on the successes and challenges over this period. You can read reflections from each geography here.
Based on our learning globally, we’re now taking forward the following recommendations:
- Our relationships with governments are critical to ensure that we can meaningfully co-design and contextualise our approach, particularly since our Covid response differs from place to place.
- Because of the structures and relationships we have in place, we have been able to support governments to respond to the crisis by being flexible and adaptive in our design and delivery.
- The middle tier (districts) have really engaged over the past year and continued to see themselves as role-models for teachers, giving us confidence that we will be able to build back quickly.
- Wherever possible, we intend to resume in-person meetings and institutes, particularly at teacher level, to ensure the maximum opportunity for practice and feedback.
- Clear technology adaption plans are critical to ensure that our stakeholders are fully equipped to use technology effectively.
- We will continue to use digital resources (especially short videos) to demonstrate model examples, even when we can resume in-person activities.
- There is a need for a long-term planning exercise with governments to identify what we want to achieve together, and how we will show impact across all levels of the system given Covid restrictions.
- There is also more that STiR can do to prepare ourselves for future shocks and changes, and we are developing scenario plans for sudden shutdowns.