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Announcing the 2024 Klaus J. Jacobs Best Practice Prizes finalists
The ten finalists have been announced for the Klaus J. Jacobs Best Practice Prizes – which acknowledge institutions or individuals who are working to implement evidence-based solutions to improve child development and learning in practice.
Ten finalists have been shortlisted and the three winners are due to be announced ahead of the ceremony in November. Read on to learn more about the various organizations and their projects, from Ghana to Colombia, and Lebanon to Mexico.
Building Tomorrow: Uganda
Building Tomorrow is a social impact organization focused on community-powered education in rural, underserved areas of Uganda with the vision of literacy and numeracy for all children. Through the support of Community Education Teams who facilitate sustainable literacy and numeracy programming, Building Tomorrow has delivered foundational learning to over 384,000 learners to date.
Coschool: Colombia
Coschool fosters social-emotional skills through EdTech and innovative pedagogy to foster positive learning environments, deliver high-quality education, and enhance well-being. Their platform Edumocion is the first platform of resources and activities for teachers in Latin America to improve and strengthen their students’ social, emotional, and mental skills.
Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN): Colombia
FEN has worked for 37 years in educational development in rural and underserved settings in Colombia, and abroad. By rethinking the learning process and promoting active, cooperative, and participatory learning, centered on the child, they have demonstrated improvements in educational quality, relevance, and efficiency, enabling equal opportunities for all children, regardless of their background, to flourish and develop their full potential.
Imagine Worldwide: Sub-Saharan Africa
Imagine Worldwide currently work in 7 Sub-Saharan countries, namely Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Liberia. They develop literacy and numeracy skills required for children around the globe to achieve their full potential. Working with governments, organizations, and communities, they provide technology-enabled learning that is accessible, affordable, and effective—built upon in-depth research on foundational learning.
International Rescue Committee (IRC): Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq
Ahlan Simsim (“Welcome Sesame”) is the single largest early childhood intervention in the history of humanitarian response. Launched through a partnership between the IRC and Sesame Workshop, Ahlan Simsim combines educational media with direct services for children and families, to support children affected by crisis and conflict to have the chance to learn, grow, and thrive. Their 11-week Remote Early Learning Programme (RELP) has produced child outcomes on par with a year of in-person preschool.
Laboratório de Educação (LABEDU): Brazil
LABEDU equips adults with the tools and knowledge required to champion equal opportunities for all children to reach their learning potential. By generating evidence from small-scale pilots to large interventions, LABEDU designs programs that make research-based practices teachable for educators at all levels. This allows teachers to plan innovative strategies that take into account student diversity, creating fair and high-quality learning environments.
Lebanese Alternative Learning: Lebanon
Lebanese Alternative Learning (LAL) provides comprehensive, freely accessible digital programs aligned with the school curriculum, featuring innovative offline solutions to reach remote areas. Their learner-centered constructivist approach promotes self-directed learning, addressing the multifaceted challenges of Lebanon’s education sector, including economic and political instability, internal displacement, and infrastructural deficiencies, to provide quality education for all students and educators.
Lively Minds: Ghana and Uganda
The Lively Minds program is getting quality early childhood care and education to more than 250,000 children in over 3,000 last-mile communities in Ghana and Uganda. At a low cost of just $14 per child, this government-run model untaps the potential of rural parents to provide better care and education for their children, using sustainable resources. It is proven to improve children’s learning outcomes by the equivalent of an extra year of school, to decrease malnutrition, and to increase mothers’ self-esteem and ability to care for their children. Lively Minds has developed a package of support for governments to enable them to deliver programs and strengthen existing systems and personnel. To date, the program is running successfully in one third of all rural communities in Ghana–with a plan to expand nationwide–and in every village in Uganda’s Mayuge district.
University of Oxford and OxEd & Assessment: United Kingdom
OxEd‘s mission is to translate research evidence into practical application by providing world-class assessments, interventions, and training, to improve educational outcomes for children, with a particular focus on children at risk of educational difficulties. By providing schools with a way of identifying early language difficulties, the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) Program improves children’s behavior and language skills in the classroom.
Universidad Veracruzana (UV) and Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS): Mexico
Universidad Veracruzana (UV) is a Public Higher Education Institution, and CIESAS is a decentralized public organization attached to the System of Public Research Centers of the Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías (CONAHCyT) in Mexico. The Special Advocacy Program “Medición Independiente de Aprendizajes (MIA)”, seeks to close foundational learning gaps (literacy, numeracy, and life skills) and reduce the educational gap in Latin America and the Caribbean through the implementation of evidence-based practices. MIA improves education by focusing its action-research work on the problem of foundational learning gaps, developing scientific evidence that has allowed us to build a model that involves diagnosis, intervention, and scaling up.
