Helping countries pioneer the future of digital learning

UNICEF's Learning Pioneers Programme is a two-year journey in which countries partner with the Learning Innovation Hub to tackle the learning crisis with world-class digital learning tools, adapted to their local context. Ministries of Education and UNICEF Country Offices are supported to identify the most pressing challenges in their education sector. Each country is then matched with proven EdTech solutions from the Blue Unicorn Portfolio, which it adapts to its own needs and scales nationally.

The programme starts by understanding each country's context and imagining possible futures for learning, then moves to matching, adapting and scaling. It has grown to 12 countries, now seen as digital learning champions for others to follow, with a growing focus on human-centred approaches and on empowering teachers.

I led the design side of the first leg of the programme, with its first cohort of countries.

• Led mixed-method research across Ghana, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Uzbekistan, engaging more than 80 educators and 160 students together with the Ministries of Education, to identify needs, gaps and opportunities.
• Synthesised and prioritised the insights, and facilitated more than ten human-centred design workshops to turn them into actionable recommendations and co-created solutions to local education challenges.
• After the co-creation workshops, identified the key contextual requirements so that each country could be matched with world-class EdTech innovations from the Blue Unicorn Portfolio.
• Led the monitoring and evaluation of the pilot, defined success metrics, and developed principles, frameworks and processes to strengthen the programme design, aligned with user needs, institutional objectives and government priorities.

The first cohort of six countries went on to adapt their matched solutions to local requirements and context. I then led the Learning Innovation Hub in evaluating the approach and methods used with the first cohort, and helped redesign the programme for future cohorts to balance efficiency and impact, ahead of its planned expansion to 16 more countries.

The experience of the first cohort led to a second, and the Learning Pioneers Programme is now running its third.