Sitting Down with Educate!'s Policy & Partnerships Strategist: Donnalee Donaldson
On March 24, 2021, Head of External Relations Rachael Miller Buck sat down with Policy & Partnerships Strategist Donnalee Donaldson to chat about her role, COVID's impacts, and what she's looking forward to.
First of all, how are you?
I'm good! I'm as good as one can be in the time of COVID. A friend of mine says “COVID fine.” I think I'm going to adopt that — I'm COVID fine.
It's been a long time since I got to catch up with you, so I'm curious if you could just start by telling me what is your job these days?
My official title is that I am a Policy and Partnership Strategist for Educate!. What that means is that I am supporting Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya Teams along three areas: a third of my work is policy, a third is product development, and a third is partnerships.
The policy piece is really about building and maintaining relationships with existing and new government partners with whom we can then co-design and develop programs that are meant to be run through education systems. So that's in many ways a continuation of work that I was doing in Rwanda as Country Director. The difference is just now all of the policy-related work rolls up to me so across all three countries.
A third of it is products, which really gets into the development of “the new thing,” whatever that new thing is. I'm creating a theory of change for it, creating a program strategy for it — and when I say create, I mean facilitating the collaboration across the right teams within Educate! to make these things come into being, because obviously none of this is the work of any one person — and testing, iterating, and really learning from all the experiments we're running to settle on a program model that we can then scale.
The other third, which is a bit more new, is partnerships. We are faced with this new reality of COVID and really needing to come up with new ways to create impact. Previously, much of our impact came, almost all of it, through a school. Because we had a relationship with schools with teachers with governments, we were able to get things done through a school system, through our relationship with a specific Head Teacher, etc. Once schools closed, we realized that a school closure essentially cut us off from youth. We don't want that to happen again. We know that COVID is not over by any means. School closures are still something that we are contending with in this region, whether on an individual scale or at the district level, or the whole nation closes again. There are other things that could happen in the future, and we want to set ourselves up so that an interruption to the school schedule does not mean an interruption to our impact, to our ability to reach youth. That is what the partnership aspect is about. It's about identifying and collaborating with peer organizations (private organizations that have some kind of relationship with the young people we're trying to reach) and setting those relationships up in a way that's mutually beneficial for us and them, as well as for young people.
Could you tell me a little bit more about the team that you collaborate with, both on the Educate! side and externally?
In terms of the education system support work, which is the policy and product combination, I work with different teams based on what the product is. In Kenya, where our product is Community Service Learning, it's currently being manifested as a radio show called Learn and Serve. The team on that is Diana Mwai, who's our Kenya Program Director, Anne Kabengi, who's our designer, and Frida Anjeche, who is right now working with us as a coordinator for all the teachers that are part of that program. We also have some regional staff like our Tech Team and Monitoring Team who are cross-cutting.
In Rwanda, we have this product that we have been working on for quite some time — a USSD component to an MIS system that's being rolled out by the government. Briefly what that means is as a part of the national curriculum reform which Educate! has been supporting in Rwanda since 2015, the government has mandated that also the way that students are assessed should change. The change that the curriculum reform requires is that assessment should be done continuously and the assessments that a student completes throughout the year should contribute to their national exam grade. We have been working with the assessment department at the Rwanda Education Board for quite some time to roll that out. Obviously, grades are something that everyone cares about: parents, teachers, society at large. So, you can't just make a radical change to it. You have to set a system up for that. There is a Management Information System that they are rolling out that would allow teachers to input their grades throughout the year to allow anyone in Kigali to be able to see what's happening in any school across the country. Educate!'s contribution has been designing trainings around that, as well as creating a USSD platform. This basically means that teachers who are in places that have no internet could just use their phone and type in codes on their phone that would allow them to submit the grades. They would not need internet, they would not need any credit or air time on their phone to do so.
That sounds really cutting edge! I'm curious if there is there an example of this in another country?
There are examples! As a part of our collaboration with the government, we did quite a number of design workshops, where we even brought in external consultants. We did collaborative research where we were able to look at use cases from other countries. Different countries do continuous assessments in different ways, whether it's Botswana whether it's Ghana (the West African Examination Council has several examples of this), the Netherlands, different regions in the Caribbean, etc. There are different ways that countries choose to do their continuous assessments. Some of them are like this, where you have a system that teachers continuously enter grades, some of them are more project-based — a student has to do several or maybe one big project that's graded within the school and then that contributes to the final grade as well.
One of the things that I think is really great about this collaborative process is that as Educate!, we were able to facilitate learning experiences for our government counterparts to see what is happening in many regions across the world, countries that have similar outlooks and resources as Rwanda, and then they were able to make great informed choices about which approach they wanted to use and to customize it for the Rwandan context.
Would you consider this part of the third stage of the Education System Solution in Rwanda?
Absolutely! Within our existing solution, we have three phases. We start with the policy and collaborating on the creation of the policy, then we get into the teacher training and student mentorship at phase two, and then the third phase is the system strengthening. Exams are a big part of that.
We did some research locally around what are the things that our key stakeholders in Rwanda care about. We talked to our teachers, the students, the parents, the government officials at the national and local level, and exams are the one thing that cut across as a primary factor for everyone. Everyone cares about grades and it's very understandable that even the most dynamic and forward-thinking teacher are accountable based on the grades that their students produce. So, no matter how many innovative things they want to do the child in their classroom, they, of course, want to be graded well by their own supervisor. They want parents to approve of them. They want the child to succeed based on what grades are on their report. So, if the test only requires a student to regurgitate information, then that's what teachers, parents, and everyone's going to encourage them to do. But when tests require students to show skill, or when their final exam grades require incorporation of projects that they have done and competencies that they have displayed, that then motivates all the key stakeholders to facilitate an environment where students can actually acquire those skills.
Are there any other things that are high on your priority list right now?
As I mentioned before, the closure of schools really prompted us to get more aggressive about incorporating blended learning into our approaches. We're thinking very strategically about how we can leverage technology to ensure that we are able to reach students at all times. It is actually a great time to be innovative, to come up with new ideas, and to be more proactive because there is a lot of openness with all of our government partners across the three countries — to see what solutions we can offer them that they may not have thought about or just haven't had the capacity to role them out.
What are you excited about right now? Is there anything you're looking forward to either in the next few months or the rest of 2021?
I am excited about being able to see my family again because I have not seen anyone I'm related to by blood since COVID has started for their own safety. I am counting down the days until that is possible again!