Announcing the Center for Education Innovations

October 2, 2012

Results for Development is pleased to announce the creation of the Center for Education Innovations, a new initiative funded by the UK Government.

Education is at a crossroads. After the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015, global education goals are expected to shift from issues of access to quality — focusing on tangible learning outcomes in children’s literacy and numeracy. Education systems will be faced with unprecedented challenges as they are pushed to not only put every child in school, but ensure the delivery of high-quality education as well. The task of providing quality education to hundreds of millions of children and young adults in low- and middle-income countries is daunting. Conventional public sector delivery mechanisms such as schools and universities alone will not be able to meet the enormous demand, financially or administratively.

Fortunately, non-state innovations are emerging that can improve the way education systems operate for the poor. There are a handful of innovations that capture global attention, but in general there is very little information on the scale, scope, and impact of the numerous organizations and social enterprises that make up the non-state sector in education.

The Center for Education Innovations (CEI) seeks to ensure that education systems capitalize on growth in the non-state sector to increase access to quality education for the poor. The core of CEI will be an online platform (www.educationinnovations.org) which is currently under development and will launch in mid-2013. The CEI platform will identify, analyze, and connect non-state education and training innovations. Features will include an innovations database, a resource library, and a funders’ platform. To effectively promote the scale-up and adaptation of promising innovations, offline activities that complement the online platform will be driven by both the CEI team at R4D and regional CEI hubs.

“The discussion about non-state education and its role in education systems is steeped in ideology,” said Nicholas Burnett, R4D managing director leading the CEI initiative. “Our goal is to cut through that ideology of public versus private and provide a neutral and objective resource that allows for the identification and scale up of promising models. There is no question that the non-state sector is a large and growing part of education systems in low- and middle-income countries. CEI aims to ensure that such growth leads to improved education and training overall by opening channels for information-sharing and communication among innovators, policymakers, funders, and researchers.”

The development of CEI will build on R4D’s experience developing and managing the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI), which is now the world’s largest freely accessible information resource on innovations in the non-state health sector.

Global & Regional Initiatives

R4D is a globally recognized leader for designing initiatives that connect implementers, experts and funders across countries to build knowledge and get that knowledge into practice.