School of Education

Scaling-Up innovative Gender, Inclusion and Safeguarding Approaches: Evidence from Malawi, Uganda and Ethiopia

The overall aim of this 36-month project is to contribute to the understanding and improvement of scale-up practices of gender equality and inclusion (GEI)-focused education projects in Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The specific objectives are to:

1. generate knowledge that contributes to a broader understanding of the scaling factors of innovations on gender equality and inclusion to guide stakeholders, including policymakers and other researchers on future GEI education interventions and scale-up strategies;
2. mobilize and disseminate knowledge on how to integrate learning from scaling the impact of practices and programmes on gender equality and inclusion to influence and improve education policy at national and local levels in the three countries; and
3. strengthen the knowledge and capacity of government staff, mainly from Ministries of Education, and other stakeholders in each country through the use of scale-up guidelines, leading to effective scale-up of projects on gender equality and inclusion in education.

The project will mobilize evidence on how to scale practices enhancing gender equality and inclusion, including what incentivizes or impedes them. It builds on four interventions previously implemented in these countries aimed at strengthening gender equality, inclusion and safeguarding in education programming. These include professional development of teachers, school leaders and supervisors; school performance review and improvement planning; national education standards; and community participation. These interventions, currently at varying stages of scale-up by the governments in question, seek to address the intersecting barriers that girls, children with disabilities and other marginalized children face in getting a quality education.

The overarching research questions focus on the factors that influence government decisions to scale up specific interventions, on the quality of interventions carried out after the end of the initial support to pilot the innovations, and on how scale-up can be improved in the future.

The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of the Government of Canada. The project is part of IDRC’s Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), ‘a CA$103 million joint endeavor with the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) to strengthen national education systems and accelerate educational progress in the Global South’ (https://idrc-crdi.ca/en/initiative/knowledge-and-innovation-exchange)