Donika Dimovska

Keeping Up With Education Innovations: New portals provide insight into growing number of programs serving the world’s poor

The Center for Education Innovations (CEI), an initiative of the Results for Development Institute, recently developed new portals to provide insight into emerging themes in education innovations for specific topics and countries. This analysis is based on a review of CEI’s extensive and growing database of innovations, now documenting more than 500 programs working in low- and middle-income countries.

Over the past year, many have used CEI to identify innovators working to provide quality, accessible education for the poor. As the CEI database continues to grow, we at CEI want to provide detailed analysis and information about certain topics and countries at the forefront of the global education dialogue. By streamlining access to information with a customized summary and a visual synthesis of education programs in the CEI database, we hope to facilitate easier learning and access to partnership opportunities among our users.

Five portals are now live on CEI covering two education topics (early childhood education and development and girls’ education) and three countries (India, Kenya and South Africa). Additional portals are in development: low-cost private schools, education technology, public-private partnerships, skills, and conflict-affected and fragile states.

With our topic portals, users can explore four different pages and eight distinct data visualizations to learn about innovations happening around the world. These pages provide a lens to focus on the wealth of programs in the database.

The topic portals will have four different pages to provide information:

Overview: Features the newest programs and relevant information on the issues, including an analysis of the themes CEI sees emerging in a topic or country, based on programs in our database.

Data visualization: Provides instant access to current aggregated data from relevant programs through our map and interactive graphs.

News & resources: Includes new and original research, opinions and insight from CEI’s blog and Research & Evidence library.

Programs: Previews the programs in the database and sorts them by location, approach, whether they’ve been externally evaluated, or how recently they’ve been updated, among other options.

CEI works to create impact – expanded access to quality, affordable education for the poor – by providing information, analysis and connections for program managers, funders, researchers and policymakers who work to enable the scale-up, replication and improvement of promising innovations in education. These topic portals are just part of that effort.

CEI will be launching new topic portals and improving current topic portals based on feedback over the next few months. To receive related updates, subscribe to our newsletter.

Donika Dimovska provides program management for the Center for Health Market Innovations as well as the new Center for Education Innovations at the Results for Development Institute.

A version of this blog originally appeared on the Center for Education Innovations website.

Categories
Education, Impact Assessment
Tags
public-private partnerships, skill development