Partners Align to fight Poverty through Innovation in Education

The 4th Annual Mobiles for Education Alliance International Symposium was held for a second consecutive year at OAS headquarters in Washington, DC, October 20 to 22.  A total of 200 partners from 70 institutions, including leading donor agencies, international organizations, NGOs, and the private sector gathered to exchange ideas on the possible applications of mobile technologies to improve education in developing countries.

The OAS is a member of the Steering Committee of the mEducation Alliance - an international collaborative effort that explores cutting-edge intersections between mobile technologies for education, particularly in low-resource and developing country context, to reduce duplicative efforts, to promote collective knowledge-sharing, and to identify and support efforts to scale promising interventions.

In her address to participants, Sherry Tross, OAS Executive Secretary for Integral Development stated that “We need to focus on two things to have impact on the ground -- innovation and access to quality education. Given that inequality continues to be one of the greatest challenges facing countries in the Americas, we need to work together to use innovative technologies to open up opportunities for larger segments of the population to access top quality education.”

Those comments are well founded. Globally, education is recognized as a key driver of income and a critical tool to escape poverty. UNESCO estimates that one year of school increases earnings by an average of 10%. It also asserts that 250 million children in the world are not learning fundamental skills such as reading, which is ultimately a reflection of low quality education environments and poorly trained teachers. Furthermore, it estimates that 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low income countries left school with basic reading skills - equivalent to a 12% cut in world poverty.

It is within this context, and in the backdrop of this year’s Symposium, that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced U$1 billion in awards to fight global poverty through education. Charles North, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator at the USAID, announced that awards will support activities over a period of five years: $500 million in activities to increase access to education in crisis and conflict-affected environments for 15 million children; and $500 million in activities to improve reading skills for up to 100 million children in primary grades.

Other significant announcements at the Symposium revolved around the assessing of project impacts, including the official launch by the German Cooperation (GIZ) of its Mobiles for Numeracy Landscape Review, and USAID’s expressed interest in attracting proactive partners for establishing significant funding for ICT4E evaluations.

The 3-day Symposium included 6 plenary sessions and close to 60 panel pitches, working group sessions, and lightning talks on issues such as technology for reading, numeracy, youth and workforce development, educational gaming, ePayments for education, and mobiles for use in complex and challenging educational environments. Additionally, participants had the opportunity to meet potential collaborators and partners with whom they can significantly strengthen and scale promising mEducation ideas, projects, and initiatives.

In this regard, the “Post 2015 MDG: Public and Private Sector Participating for Scale” plenary session specially illustrated how multi-sectorial participation and public-private collaboration have the tremendous potential of sustainably scaling-up project impact. In her remarks during this session, Secretary Tross explained that in the area of development, the OAS functions as a “organization and a solutions multiplier,  bringing together people who are already working in various aspects on innovation, education and other areas, and utilizing  those partnerships to enable the kind of change that can be transformative.”

This view was supported by Martina Roth, Intel’s Sr. Director of the Global Strategy, Research and Policy, who highlighted that “collaboration has never been more urgent than now.” She further explained that Intel’s commitment to the alliance is based on the understanding that “education improvement leads to economic growth, which in turn leads to economic development.”

Participating institutions included key champions of Education and members of the mEducation Alliance, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), as well as many other private sector companies such as Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung-Latin America, United Way-Latin America and the Omar Dengo Foundation.