Virtual CIES - Learning for/in a risky planet: Consequences for children in highly unfavorable educational contexts

On Tuesday, March 24th, The Equity Initiative hosted the webinar, Learning for/in a risky planet: Consequences for children in highly unfavorable educational contexts as part of our vCIES webinar series.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have placed a high priority on the quality of education and on learning. The development goals are mainly normative: that is, they tend to emphasize averages across nations, with relatively limited attention to the major variations within countries and to the groups performing at the low end of the distribution. During the last several years, experts from around the world have sought to explore the scientific tensions related to understanding learning among poor and marginalized populations in low-income countries (LICs)—those at the “bottom of the pyramid” or BoP (Wagner 2018; Wagner, et al., 2018). International organizations, donor agencies, and many national governments often invoke BoP populations as the target of their investments—trying to help the poorest of the poor. Still, our understanding of learning seems inadequate to the challenge ensuring learning for all. This panel will begin by briefly laying out what we know at the policy level about children’s learning outcomes that can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, language, and gender, and broad changes due to megatrends (and their definition). Evidence is beginning to show that improved equity in learning in BoP populations can impact on sustainable development even in terms of environment, migration and civil conflict. The overall focus of this panel was to expand the conversation about learning for all in low-income countries, and especially in high-risk contexts, by bringing greater attention to reducing learning inequalities within and across countries. This panel offered ideas relevant to improving learning impact, and implications for the other UN SDGs that rely on learning to address current and future global challenges on a planetary basis.

This webinar was facilitated by Dan Wagner (University of Pennsylvania), Kwame Akyeampong (University of Sussex), Luis Crouch (RTI International), Nathan Castillo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Benjamin Piper (RTI International) and Suzanne Grant-Lewis (IIEP-UNESCO). Check out their presentations below: