ADEA's Strategic Focus on Education System Resilience

Education System Resilience (ESR) has emerged as a key focus in ADEA’s Strategic Plan (2024-2028), driven by the significant disruptions caused by COVID-19, climate change, and conflicts. Resilient education systems can better withstand these challenges, ensuring that learning continues uninterrupted for all learners.

ADEA prioritizes its support to member countries to create transformative and resilient education systems that leverage technology, foster inclusive access, and utilize data. The goal is to enable informed decision-making while ensuring equitable learning opportunities for all, especially the most marginalized.

ADEA recognizes that achieving educational resilience hinges on the collaboration of various educational actors and supporting personnel. This includes school management committees, school principals, and administrative staff, all of whom play crucial roles in empowering teachers and supporting the teaching/learning process. The Association advocates for equipping teachers with the necessary skills to effectively integrate technology into their teaching practices. Additionally, ADEA promotes fostering strong partnerships between schools and families, engaging communities and civil society organizations to create a supportive learning environment.

ADEA’s Approach in Education System Resilience

ADEA adopts a broad definition of ESR, which is “the capacity of an education system to absorb, resist, and adapt to disturbances while ensuring the continuity of its vital functions. It encompasses multiple dimensions and goes beyond recovering to a previous state or new equilibrium but extends to continuous adaptation and proactive anticipation of changing circumstances.” ¹

As outlined in its 2024-2028 Strategic Plan, ADEA is planning to: 

1. Encourage Each Country to Use the Access, Equity, and Inclusion (AEI) Framework: Identify and categorize disadvantaged learners to cater to those with special educational needs, such as those with physical, sensory, and mental disabilities. 
2. Build Sustainable and Resilient Education Systems: Anticipate shocks and crises, including setting up functional contingency plans.
3. Promote Frameworks for a Cross-Ministerial Approach: Sensitize various stakeholders and decision makers on the importance of quality data for advancing education and skills.
4. Advocate for the Design, Formulation, and Implementation of Comprehensive EdTech Policies: Support the co-creation of such these policies with the relevant stakeholders.

ADEA’s Achievement Highlights in Education System Resilience

Remote Education Benchmarking Toolkits (REBTKs):

• REBTK for Basic Education: outlines twelve key norms, each accompanied by best practice standards, to guide the implementation and enhancement of remote education. These norms include establishing a robust policy and legal framework, creating contextually relevant curricula, ensuring equitable access, and building a capable teaching workforce. It also emphasizes the importance of integrating new technologies, developing strong education management information systems, fostering public-private partnerships, and ensuring child online safety. The toolkit serves as a self-assessment tool, helping countries identify gaps and develop action plans to improve their remote education readiness.

  By promoting the adoption of international best practices and providing practical guidelines, the toolkit aims to enhance the quality and accessibility of education across Africa. It is designed to be a living document, adaptable to changing contexts and continuously improved through stakeholder feedback.

• REBTK for Technical and Vocational Skills Development (TVSD): comprises thirteen key norms, each encompassing a set of standards and benchmarks that guide the implementation and improvement of remote TVSD systems. These norms cover robust policy frameworks, competency-oriented curricula, strong trainer workforce capacity, equitable access, and the integration of new technologies and infrastructure. The toolkit also emphasizes the importance of public-private partnerships, work-based learning, resource mobilization, effective communication, conflict prevention, monitoring and evaluation, and psychosocial support.

  By providing a detailed checklist-based approach, the toolkit enables countries to assess their readiness for remote TVSD, identify gaps, and develop targeted action plans to bridge these gaps. It aims to ensure that remote education systems are sustainable, inclusive, and capable of delivering high-quality, competency-based training that meets the needs of both learners and the labor market.

• REBTK for Higher Education: This comprehensive guide aims to enhance the implementation of distance education across African higher education institutions. It addresses the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and outlines eleven key norms, each encompassing standards, benchmarks, and implementation actions, aimed at establishing a robust and effective distance education framework.

  The norms include the creation of a strong legal and policy framework, effective strategy and organization, appropriate technology governance, adapted training programs, and competent teaching staff. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of administrative support, student engagement, dynamic partnerships, transparent communication, sustainable development, and future consolidation of distance learning practices. The toolkit is designed as a self-assessment tool for governments and educational institutions to evaluate their current practices, identify gaps, and implement improvements. It encourages the adoption of international best practices and strategic planning to ensure equitable access to quality education.

Strengthening Education System Resilience

ADEA’s aims to ensure that member countries are better prepared to handle future disruptions and continue to provide quality education to all learners. Hence, it envisions to strengthen the resilience of educational systems through three critical and cross-cutting areas:

Improved Utilization of Education and Skills Data Enhancing data-driven decision-making processes to ensure the efficient allocation of resources and targeted interventions. Read more

Effective Leveraging of EdTech Utilizing educational technologies to improve education quality and facilitate continuous learning, even during disruptions. Read more

Improved Access, Equity, and Inclusion Ensuring that vulnerable groups, including those with special educational needs, have equitable access to quality education. Read more

1. Dülks, J., Fekete, A., Karutz, H., Kaufmann, J., & Posingies, C. (2023). Identification of methodologies to quantify education system resilience - A scoping review. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 97, 103967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103967