Teamwork is crucial to achieving SDG4: Quality Education

CAMFED welcomes the release of a new report by the Education Commission – Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation – which underlines the importance of strengthening, diversifying, and reimagining an education workforce in order to deliver inclusive, quality education for all.

This new report draws on existing evidence and innovations — from education and other sectors — that point to how the wider community can work together to achieve SDG4, and, as a consequence, other global goals.

Right now the world is not on track to achieve SDG4.  260 million children are out of school, and more than 600 million children are in school, but not learning the basics, leaving them without the adequate skills or knowledge required to thrive now and in the future. The report underscores teacher quality as the most important determinant of learning outcomes at the school level, but in many countries teachers are in short supply, isolated, and not supported to provide effective teaching and learning.

CAMFED contributed to the Education Commission Report, and shared its model of girls’ education, a holistic, grassroots-led approach delivered in partnership with departments of education, which recognizes and positions communities as stakeholders in the success of their children – in school and after school.

CAMFED invests in an education ecosystem, formed not just of a ‘workforce’ of teachers, but also of activists embedded in their local community, with members of the CAMFED alumnae network, CAMA, now spearheading our programs:

• CAMFED Alumnae – young women school graduates in the CAMA network share a deep committed to supporting the next generation of marginalized children in their education. By investing in building their skills, and enlisting their expertise, we’re supporting a new cadre of mentors, role models and future teachers. CAMA members volunteer as Learner Guides, delivering a life skills and wellbeing curriculum, and have been shown to significantly drive up learning outcomes. As Transition Guides, they step up to support girls and other young women as they navigate into adulthood.
• Teacher Mentors – in every CAMFED partner school there is a specialist teacher, trained to offer pscho-social support to marginalized children at risk of school dropout.
• Parents – as key stakeholders parents often become involved in support groups, working together to lead school feeding programs, the construction of new school facilities and other initiatives, including safeguarding of children at boarding facilities.

Part of the CAMFED  ‘education workforce’: A parent support group member, an education official, a school headmaster and a Teacher Mentor.

• Local Leaders and Education Officials – with their knowledge and sway, local leaders galvanize communities to take action to support more children to go to school and succeed. 

Through our partnership with departments of education, we are working to scale programs that improve the quality of education for all, led by educated young women whose own experience of exclusion means that they know how to reach out to the most marginalized children, because the success of those who are hardest to reach is an important barometer for the success of an education system as a whole.

Read the Education Commission report: Transforming the Education Workforce: Learning Teams for a Learning Generation