UNHCR Humanitarian Education Accelerator

All too often, education programs lose their impact as they move to scale. HEA, an innovation accelerator program led by UNHCR, supports promising humanitarian education innovations to transition from successful pilots to programs that can operate at scale.

Key to the ability to do so are strong monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems and capacities that allow for the continuous collection and analysis of high-quality data – and the ability to turn this data into evidence-based program decisions. As innovations scale, this also requires the ability to create synergies in MEL efforts between partner data systems and learning priorities, thereby supporting investment and buy-in from, and alignment with, stakeholders and donors.

Global TIES for Children aimed to build with our partners mutual capacity for strong monitoring, evaluation, and learning practices while scaling, and to improve our own ability to communicate clearly about such practices. In doing so, we supported teams’ abilities to make evidence-informed program decisions while contributing to a broader knowledge base about how to support education innovation effectiveness and quality at a broader scale.

We aimed to achieve our goals by developing:

A Tailored Curriculum

We developed a tailored curriculum to build the skills and capacities most relevant and urgent to the HEA teams. Through a structured capacity assessment, we assessed teams’ organizational norms, values, and attitudes towards MEL; their human, technological, and infrastructural resources; and how those resources are organized to support MEL.

A Hybrid Course on Inclusive Approaches to Adapting Holistic Learning Measures

We piloted a hybrid course based on adult learning design principles on how to adapt holistic learning outcome measures using a mixed-methods, inclusive approach. Modules to date have focused on building a theory of change, defining the outcomes of interest, selecting assessments that are fit for purpose, and basic statistics using readily available software (e.g., Excel and Google sheets). Modules are designed to be open-access and usable as public goods.

Targeted Technical Support

We provided targeted technical and communications support to the teams and the HEA. We partnered with teams to support them in developing key assessments, tools, and data infrastructure and to disseminate the resulting evidence through blogs, briefs, and journal articles.