Delivering educational transformation in Africa, with Cambridge Partnership for Education
Annie Michailidou, Head of Global Engagement
As Head of Global Engagement at Cambridge Partnership for Education, a unit within the University of Cambridge, Annie specialises in identifying opportunities to improve education equity and quality by raising standards and giving learners the knowledge, understanding and practical skills to succeed in the modern world. She seeks to deliver economic and social transformation through bespoke education programmes world-wide.
Annie’s background is in strategic business intelligence research and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), with a focus on the education sector. She has years of experience overseeing business intelligence reports and projects that examine economic trends, education reforms, political risk and regulatory developments in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Invest Africa sits down with Annie to find out more about the work Cambridge University Press is doing across Africa and how the unit is driving education reform across the Continent.
What does the merger of Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment mean for governments, organisations, teachers and learners? What role does Cambridge Partnership for Education play here?
The merger means Cambridge has the capabilities to provide world-leading assessment, learning and academic research offerings, backed by first-class teaching and research departments, under one roof. Our customers and partners can now engage with Cambridge in a joined-up way. We can also deliver the innovative services governments, organisations, teachers and learners need by combining expertise in learning and assessment. Camb ridge Partnership for Education is already a fully integrated team. Since our inception in 2020, we’ve been providing combined expertise from across Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment to help governments and organisations around the world develop quality, coherent education systems. We work on education development from every angle – from policy recommendations to curriculum to teacher training and more. This will continue to be our role. We remain part of the University of Cambridge, and we continue to work together with our partners to deliver transformative change for teachers, learners, communities, countries and our world.
2. How does Cambridge Partnership for Education work with partners, and what role does partnership play in the future of education?
As you can tell from our name, partnership is at the heart of what the Cambridge Partnership for Education does. Partnerships are an increasingly prevalent trend in the marketplace. Building partnerships is about working with others to achieve what we cannot achieve on our own. This is echoed in the UN’s sustainable development goals; Sustainable Development Goal 17 is all about ‘partnerships for the goals’ and recognises the strength that comes from inclusive partnerships at the global, regional, national and local levels built upon a shared vision. One of the targets is to drive multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilise and share knowledge, expertise, technology, and financial resources, to support the achievement of the SDGs in all countries, in particular developing countries. This includes partnerships between governments, international development organisations and education specialists, but educational partnerships involving the private sector and philanthropy have key roles to play in pushing the global sustainable development agenda too.
Partnerships can be useful in a broad range of situations and to meet very different needs. For example, we often work with partners in consortia to pursue particular opportunities to work on education programmes. Sometimes this involves coming together with other organisations to design and implement large-scale, multi-year education programmes. Other times, we might come together with another organisation because we have complementary capabilities that help us deliver what an education system needs. Ultimately, it comes down to what a system needs and how best to support our clients or stakeholders.
3. At the Global Education Summit, we saw $4 billion committed to helping transform education for millions of children and young people. As governments and organisations take the next steps in converting this support into impactful action, what must we consider?
The outcome of the Global Education Summit is a welcome development that again reaffirms the importance with which education is viewed by the global community. Particularly in our current situation, investment in the fulfilment and growth of young people represents a crucial component of worldwide economic recovery and will act as a bulwark against lost livelihoods in the midst of the pandemic. However, there is always concern over the correct allocation of funds for global education development, and deciding how to spend on education is certainly no easier now than it was in 2019.
So what are the ‘right’ directions to send this increasing commitment to funding education? I’d suggest three key areas:
1. Investing in improving governance. As of 2019, governments themselves still accounted for more than three quarters of the global education budget. So, as impactful as the increases in multilateral and bilateral education funding such as that through the Global Education Summit have been, it is still governments who control the bulk of the spending power. As a global community we need to support governments to further develop the capabilities they need to spend on education most effectively.
2. Significantly improving data and evidence collection and use. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s African Governance Report 2019 observed that indicators for 11 of the 17 SDGs don’t have sufficient levels of data to assess progress for Africa (see also Claire Melamed here). Dealing with the so-called ‘data deficit’ for education, particularly around outcomes, will be vital for guiding future policy and spending, and needs investment now.
3. Concentrating on longer-term interventions. Expecting changes overnight and changing direction when impact is not immediate are not sustainable approaches and are less likely to lead to improvements sticking. Because every education system is different, time is needed to adjust and respond to its specific demands.
4. We don’t often think of education as an export – how has Cambridge Partnership for Education been able to support ministries and teachers in establishing stronger and more collaborative education systems?
I think part of the reason for this is that ‘education’ is often harder to conceive of as a typical good or service. Cambridge Partnership for Education is part of the University of Cambridge, whose mission is the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence; we think of education along these lines, as an objective that we share with our partners rather than a commodity. Our partnership-focused approach reinforces this mission, and while we seek to share knowledge and expertise through our work, we at Cambridge are always learning from our partner governments through our involvement in their reform programmes.
I’d add too that a dynamic of global education exchange that has shifted recently is the capacity and appetite for distance or remote learning, which has obvious impacts on our ability to provide education across borders. While there are clear challenges presented by teaching and learning online, it has been impressive to see the extent to which students and teachers at all levels have adapted to a new digital environment over the last year. This may well have a lasting effect on how we conceive of education ‘export’ in the future. Nevertheless, at Cambridge Partnership for Education we are keenly aware of the effect that lack of access to digital learning during global school closures has had on many students, and our priorities remain in ensuring education improvement is equitable and reaches all students.
5. Do you consider education to be a ‘growth market’ everywhere in Africa?
Education is a very diverse sector, encompassing a wide range of different types of customer and supplier; African economies are no different, and many countries have some of the world’s most varied education requirements in terms of provision. Consequently, the rate of expansion of demand in the sector and sub-sectors can be quite different depending on the exact needs and existing context of the particular country - for instance, the market for professional development services may be quite disconnected from that for educational software - so the ‘growth market’ label certainly cannot be applied uniformly.
On the other hand, it is still the case that private and public funding of education is growing rapidly across the continent. Africa spends more of its GDP on education than anywhere else in the developing world (an average of 5%). Combined with dramatic demographic change as the continent’s young population grows rapidly, the climate is for growth to continue to be strong.
The concern, however, is that due to these demographic changes spend per pupil is still very low, meaning that effectively allocating resources within education systems and making sure that the education delivered is high-quality are big challenges. Demand is likely to continue to grow for decades, but the political will to fund provision needs to persist and grow with it.
6. As we emerge from Covid-19, how can we recover learning losses and continue to pursue Sustainable Development Goal 4 – inclusive and equitable education for all?
This is a very challenging question! We are only starting to assess and understand the scale of the learning loss resulting from school closure during the pandemic, which will vary enormously depending on countries and within countries on different socio-economic groups. Using data from Ghana, researchers from the university of Cambridge and DTI suggest as much as a year’s worth of past academic progress made by disadvantaged children in the Global South may have been wiped out during the pandemic. This is tragic as it signals a likely reversal of the progress made over the past 20 years in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 in many countries that were gradually addressing both access and attainment targets.
The massive disruption brought about by the pandemic on education systems has revealed and increased the stark inequalities that existed before Covid-19. It is clear that new solutions need to be implemented not only to address the current challenges of learning loss but more importantly to address pre-existing issues facing governments in improving attainment for all as a way to reduce poverty, provide decent work and increase good health and well-being, all key other Sustainable Development Goals. There is no magic solution to address these issues but two strong starting point are data and research. We think that in this context of crisis, it is the time to make every decision, every policy and every investment count and the right data is crucial to make the right investments in education. The right data, combined with research and evidence of what works, can help us make the right investment decisions by focusing education budgets on the areas we know can make the most difference.
For example, the Nobel Laureate of Economics James Heckman’s research shows that high-quality birth-to-five programmes for disadvantaged children can deliver a 13% per year return on investment and that children who attend such programmes arrive at primary school ready to learn; achieve better results; earn more in later life and are more likely to uphold the values of their society. The best data we have shows that early childhood programmes help break cycles of poverty and inequity and the evidence is getting stronger. Other evidence shows the importance of focusing on specific marginalised groups as a way to ensure the greatest return on investment - a study by academics at the University of Cambridge showed international development projects that target the education of the world’s poorest children and marginalised girls also significantly improve other young people’s attainment. Data and research have become critical tools enabling us to make good, cost-effective decisions: it can inform decisions about where to invest; it helps targeting interventions and it helps monitor and accelerate progress.
Contact details
Megan Thomas, PR & Communications Manager, Cambridge Partnership for Education
Email: mmthomas@cambridge.org