New KIX Projects Announced in West and Central Africa and the Indian Ocean

The Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) has selected six new projects from its competitive call for proposals to generate and mobilize knowledge for education challenges in West and Central Africa and the Indian Ocean.  Each project aims to build and mobilize knowledge so that national education systems in developing country contexts can address shared policy challenges related to improving access, quality and the performance of their systems.  

Last year, the regional KIX hub for West and Central Africa and the Indian Ocean (KIX Africa 21) conducted a targeted study to identify key regional education challenges among the GPE partner countries that make up the hub. The hub then brought together national education policy makers from GPE partner countries, local education groups, and education experts to identify the region’s key education priorities and share and validate results. Through this process, the hub identified the following priority areas: pre- and in-service teacher training; offering opportunities for out-of-school children and youth; promoting gender equality and girls’ success in school; and quality teaching and learning in multilingual environments. In identifying the education challenges across the twenty-one countries that makes up the KIX Africa 21 hub, this meeting, and the report, informed the local and regional research agenda and shaped the project proposals for the KIX Africa 21 region.  

The selected projects will address shared policy challenges and propose different approaches to increase the impact of education innovations, working in countries like Burkina Faso, Chad, Madagascar, and Senegal, among others. In particular, this cohort of projects places gender equality and teacher professional development at the forefront, emphasizing the newfound challenges associated with distance learning and adapting to ongoing disruptions. 

More information on each of KIX’ exciting new projects can be found below, with more updates on their activities to follow:  

• Improving Knowledge on Gender Norms to Promote Gender Equality in Schools in Africa 
• The Forum of African Women Educationalists’ gender-sensitive school model as an innovative response to the challenge of gender equality 
• Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Teacher and student education for Primary Schools–STEPS 
• A New Model of Bridging Classes to Improve Learning of Out-of-School Children and Youth  
• Improving Community Teacher Development in the Digital Era  
• Strengthening Bilingual and Multilingual Learning Systems in Francophone Africa