Jite Phido is a senior program manager on the scaling innovations team at Results for Development (R4D), where she manages the equity and inclusion, and systems innovation thematic areas at R4D’s International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) secretariat. She additionally manages IDIA’s global innovation advisors program, a network of technical experts, thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and system disruptors from low- and middle-income countries who share IDIA’s priorities and objectives, and use their expertise and experience to improve IDIA’s work.

Throughout her career, Jite has focused on participatory approaches to development that leverage community participation and inclusion. She has designed media interventions that have reached over 25 million Nigerians across the country in six languages. Her multimedia policy research on the role of community health workers in driving equitable health access for the Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health at Scale project won an award from the Development Research and Projects Center in Nigeria. As a bridge fellow with the Nigeria Economic Summit Group, Jite was seconded as the technical assistant to the Women Affairs Thematic Working Group, supporting the federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development’s work mainstreaming gender equity and social inclusion in health, education, livelihoods and governance, into the federal government of Nigeria Medium Term National Development Plan (2021-2025), a historical first for a Nigerian national plan.

Prior to joining R4D, Jite was an Atlantic fellow for social and economic equity based at the London School of Economics’ International Inequalities Institute, where her focus of study was on gender equity and dominant media narratives and discourses around how marginalized people make claims and challenge power for a more just world. Before that, she was the program director at ARDA Development Communication Inc, a leading development communication non-profit based in Lagos, Nigeria, where she worked with local and international donors, partners, clients, government agents, civil society, and communities to design and produce radio programs, videos, distance learning toolkits, participatory theatre productions, print IECs, IVR solutions, and mobile applications that addressed Nigeria’s endemic inequalities through advocacy and by targeting barriers to systems change and increasing access to information, services, networks, and social inclusion.

Ms. Phido holds an M.Sc. in inequalities and social science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MPH in global maternal and child health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and a B.A. in biology with a minor concentration in French from Clark University.

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Ms. Wyss has spent her career focused on mitigating inequality. She started at the UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health supporting research on early marriage, reproductive health, and health education. She later transitioned to research focusing on gender and girls’ education, climate change education, teacher practice, and international education policy. She has also supported gender equity and education research at the Brookings Institution, CARE International, and the Population Council.

Ms. Wyss got her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of educational policy studies where she concentrated in comparative and international education. Her graduate training included a specialization in education-focused qualitative methods. She also has a BA in global health from the University of California, San Diego.

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Before joining R4D, Ms. Chuang was a policy consultant with the Eswatini Ministry of Education and Training, where she supported the expansion of distance education programming across the country. In addition, she has previously worked on various healthcare, non-profit, and international development projects as a management consultant at Accenture.

Ms. Chuang holds an Ed.M. in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in biological sciences and a business minor from Cornell University.

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Mr. Ezenwa is a program officer at Results for Development (R4D) working in R4D’s health financing program, the Local Health System Sustainability project (LHSS) and the NHIS Leadership Development Program (NLDP) in Nigeria. He coordinates with Nigeria’s federal government to institutionalize Ministry of Health budget process reforms and cascade to the 36 states plus the capital territory. Mr. Ezenwa provides sustainable mechanisms to channel government and donor partners’ expenditure to the primary health care system, with the goal of lowering OOPs for covered services.

Mr. Ezenwa supports the MoH, National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) and the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) through capacity building, evidence generation and synthesis and knowledge translation. Working with partners and stakeholders, he supports the implementation of the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF) which is the largest pro-poor focused fund from the government of Nigeria to improve health outcomes. He works closely with the NHIA to design, set up and implement their leadership development program which aims to strengthen the policy development and implementation capacities of the NHIA at the national and sub-national levels and reposition the NHIA to provide technical support to state social health insurance schemes. He has also worked on Nigeria’s demand side financing project to expand enrollment in health services in Niger, in Kaduna states and among vulnerable groups. He also provides technical and management guidance to analytic work outputs.

Mr. Ezenwa’s career has been focused on expanding health coverage and access to low-income populations. He started his work in public health by supporting operational research, developing and facilitating capacity-building modules and tools for BHCPF, and providing technical and administrative support to mobile teams on field missions.

Prior to joining R4D, Mr. Ezenwa was an independent verification agent for the Nigeria State Health Investment Project, where he implemented quality and quantity verification and counter-verification for primary health care centers in northeastern Nigeria.

Mr. Ezenwa holds a BS degree in Human Physiology from the Anambra State University in Nigeria. He is a native speaker of Igbo and speaks fluent English.

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Organized by Educate a Child and the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) and taking place at the WISE Summit, “High-Hanging Fruit” convened senior panelists to discuss the issue of out-of-school children from global and country perspectives. The panelists presented innovations and strategies employed by Educate a Child’s partners in Bangladesh, Cambodia and India that attempt to address the issue.

Speakers included:

• Caitlin Sparks, Education Program Assistant for UNESCO Qatar (Moderator)
• Dr. Sylvia Montoya, Director of UIS-UNESCO Paris
• Mark Roland, Results for Development Program Director
• Safeena Hussein, Executive Director of Educate Girls in India
• Dr. Shahidul Islam, Head of Education Programs for DAM in Bangladesh
• Savy Lach, Regional Director for Aide de Action International
• Dr. Mary Joy Pigozzi, Executive Director of Educate a Child (Host)

The post “High-Hanging Fruit” — Lessons on Out-of-School Children appeared first on Results for Development.

This week the world celebrated the first International Day of Education. It needs to be a celebration of achievements and a commitment to do much, much better.

Across the globe there are hundreds of millions of children and youth out of school because of extreme poverty, conflict, gender discrimination and other reasons such as that simply, there are not enough resources allocated to education.

These out of school children are evidence that some governments are undervaluing the very resource that enables them to grow, to prosper, to be recognized for their contributions–a quality basic education.

The data are not controversial–investments in education improve economies, health and well-being, population planning, the environment, employability, housing, and peace-building and sustainability, to name a few and as documented by many studies including those by the United Nations and the World Bank. The costs of not educating are higher than those of sound, universal education systems. In Mali, alone, research by Educate A Child a programme of Education Above All Foundation and Results for Development, estimates that not educating out of school children results in an annual loss in GDP by almost 7%.

To read the full article, click here.

Photo © Results for Development/Michael Duff

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At Results for Development, Dr. Fletcher is an economist with the Evaluation and Adaptive Learning team and also supports a wide range of projects across R4D’s practice areas with technical expertise. These projects include Rapid Feedback MERL, R4D’s collaboration with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, pneumonia work led by the Market Shaping team, and collaborating with the Accountability and Citizen Engagement team on Leveraging Transparency to Combat Corruption.

Dr. Fletcher’s scholarly writing has appeared in several outlets, including the Journal of Development Studies, Maternal and Child Health, Economic History Review and Migration Letters. She has a large body of influential work on social norms and related programming, specifically with respect to violence and discrimination against women and children, which has appeared in the Handbook of Gender and Psychology as well as in white papers authored with DFID, UNFPA and UNICEF.

Before joining R4D, Dr. Fletcher ran a small research and evaluation firm from Denver, CO. For a range of clients including the IRC, FEWS NET, USAID, UNFPA, UNICEF and many small international NGOs, she conducted formative and applied research, cost-benefit analysis and monitoring and evaluation projects for international economic development. In her former life as an academic, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School and taught economics at Lafayette College and Gettysburg College after dabbling in, and ultimately failing at, a journalism career in Venezuela.

Dr. Fletcher serves on the Advisory Board at Al Mokha (www.almokha.com) as an economist advisor on partnerships and issues of international economic development. She holds a PhD and MA in cconomics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BS from Duke University in economics and Latin American studies. She speaks English and Spanish fluently and a smattering of any number of languages native to places she’s lived and traveled.

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Related Resource: Promoting Secondary School Retention in Latin America and the Caribbean

Insights for decision-makers on designing and implementing strong and coherent school retention strategies

Learn More

Although most countries in the region have achieved universal primary education — and made significant strides in increasing access to secondary education — the upper secondary school completion rate is only 59 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The high level of secondary school dropout is concerning and has significant economic short- and long-term implications for the region. Students who drop out of school may not obtain the skills needed to contribute productively to the economy and are more likely to work in the informal economy or be unemployed.

This study, Promoting Secondary School Retention in Latin America and the Caribbean: Lessons from Mexico and Chile, provides practical recommendations on how decision-makers in Latin America and the Caribbean region can counter this challenge. In addition, the study includes an exploration of how country responses can take a gender-sensitive or gender-transformative approach.

“Our report offers a set of policy prescriptions for national strategies that go beyond designing interventions to focus on how these strategies can be implemented more effectively,” said Robert Francis, a senior program associate for education at Results for Development and co-author of the report. “We found that successful responses to secondary school dropout are systematic, well-coordinated and involve committed actors at national, regional and local levels. Isolated programs are insufficient to address the complex factors that lead students to leave school early.”

The analysis, which was funded by CAF, identifies factors that contribute to dropout and shares evidence of different approaches that have been implemented as a response by education systems in the region. Four initiatives currently tackling dropout were selected for case studies, including: the Construye T program and “Yo No Abandono” in Mexico; and the JUNAEB national targeting system, and the Aquí Presente program in Chile.

Findings and recommendations were presented at an event in Montevideo, where experts and policymakers from more than 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean gathered to discuss strategies for dropout reduction in differing political, social and economic contexts.

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About Results for Development

Results for Development (R4D) is a leading non-profit global development partner. We collaborate with change agents around the world — government officials, civil society leaders and social innovators — to create strong systems that support healthy, educated people. We help our partners move from knowing their goal to knowing how to reach it. We combine global expertise in health, education and nutrition with analytic rigor, practical support for decision-making and implementation and access to peer problem-solving networks. Together with our partners, we build self-sustaining systems that serve everyone and deliver lasting results. Then we share what we learn so others can achieve results for development, too. For more information, visit our website at: www.r4d.org.

The post New Study Explores How Decision-Makers in Latin America and the Caribbean Can Reduce Secondary School Dropout Rates appeared first on Results for Development.

Each year, millions of children are unable to attend school, and many who do are not receiving the quality education they deserve. But a consensus about how to address the problem is emerging, and new international forums known as “peer action networks” are providing the framework to implement solutions.

To read the full article, click here.

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