Kizazi

Describe the product or program that is the focus of your proposed LEAP project.

Kizazi’s purpose is to ensure this generation of children are empowered by education to thrive, wherever in the world they grow up. We do this by working with local partners to develop, operate and spread breakthrough school models in under-resourced communities around the world.

Kizazi works with local NGOs and governments to develop a new approach to transforming public schools in under-resourced contexts towards holistic outcomes. Our core programs have three key objectives:

• Form local coalitions for change: Kizazi partners with a local NGOs and governments who align with our vision, and are committed to developing and scaling a new vision for their schools

• Create examples of new models of school: Kizazi, local NGO and government co-develop school models based on local needs and Kizazi’s global learnings, implements the model in pilot set of schools and continuously test, improve, evaluate and codify the school model and deliver significantly improved learning outcomes

• Support the system to adopt the new approaches: Kizazi and local NGO work with the government to build the system’s capacity to adopt the new approaches and implement them at scale

Kizazi works with NGOs & local government partners to deliver on the above objectives through four key mediums: 

• Direct design and implementation support e.g.,  developing a whole school intervention design, implementing & iterating on it, collecting evidence & codifying it

• Workshops and exposure e.g., on ground training and coaching on breakthrough school approaches

• Tools & knowledge resources e.g., student outcome frameworks, tools for student data collection and analysis

• External collaborations e.g., learning exchange with other Kizazi partners or curated experts in the field focused on a priorities specific to the partner

Select the key characteristics of your target population. Select all that apply.

• Women & Girls
• Primary school children (ages 5-12)
• Youth and adolescents (ages 12-24)
• Rural
• Peri-Urban
• Urban
• Poor
• Low-Income

In which countries do you currently operate?

• Armenia
• India
• Nigeria
• Sierra Leone

In which countries do you plan to be operating within the next year?

• Armenia
• India
• Nigeria
• Sierra Leone

How have you worked with affected communities to design your solution?

At Kizazi, “rootedness” and “interdependence” are two core values with which we operate. We recognize the limitations of our perspectives and support community-led change by working together and building authentic relationships. Therefore, we and our NGO partners work with multiple stakeholders to achieve project objectives – 

• Local Governments: We collaborate with the Ministry of Education in our countries of operation across all stages of the projects. We work with the local government from the outset, working with them to define the vision and intended outcomes for students, and plans for piloting and scaling the program.

• Private sector: We frequently partner with the private sector for their financial and knowledge support (e.g., data systems), we also are also taking learnings from high-performing low-income private schools on school model design.

• NGOs: We collaborate with other NGOs for their expertise and knowledge base to accelerate our school design process and build partner capacity, for e.g., we partnered with School 21 in the UK to build our partner capacity on project based learning

• Students: During the planning and design phase of the project, we conduct focus group discussions with the students to understand their needs and aspirations. During implementation, we routinely collect student feedback on the project through formative and summative means.

• Teachers and Principals: Another set of our key stakeholders are the teachers and principals we support to design and implement the school model. We integrate their feedback on the needs and context of the schools and work with them on-ground to build their capacity to implement the school model. 

• Parents: We work with parents and community members to ensure students are supported even when they are not in school. Apart from interviews in the diagnostic and design phase, we get their feedback through parent teacher conferences, school management committee meetings and community visits.

What is your theory of change?

Kizazi's Theory Of Change

Inputs

• Kizazi brings together global and local personnel with experience in school design and system transformation to work with local partners

• Kizazi curates knowledge and research on transformative ways of teaching-learning and capacity building

• Kizazi develops tools, templates, and processes on these topics
  

Activities

• Kizazi partners with high-potential and committed local NGO and government as partners to work together 

• Kizazi creates transformative learning journeys for partners to develop vision and strategy for school model design rooted in context and research  

• Kizazi facilitates cycles of design and implementation of school models

• Kizazi works to clarify insights and improvements in the process, and build evidence

• Kizazi co-develops approaches and builds systems’ capacity  to scale what’s working

Outputs

• Coalitions are formed of NGOs, governments, and funders all working together towards redesigning schools

• There is improved capacity of local partner for renewed purposes of education, school model design, and to access insights

• Local partners builds evidence, establishes process and documents program

• Local partners scale the proven approaches to impact many more children and begin large-scale system change

Outcomes

• Champions are cultivated at all levels who advocate for a transformative shift in education

• Improvement in student learning, teaching & leadership practice, culture & measurement in schools

• Partners have enabling systems in place for sustained change e.g., learning systems, readiness for scale

Impact 

• We are influencing the national and global conversation on education priorities and approaches to include holistic focus, equity & thriving

• Kizazi partners have innovative ways to scale their approach to transformational education

• Evidence of transformation in local schools and communities

How are you currently using evidence within your theory of change?

At Kizazi, we work with local NGOs and governments to co-develop and scale transformational school model. We do this by setting up pilot schools in our programs as “learning labs” and conducting rapid cycles of prototyping solutions. There are five key steps to this process.

• First we begin with clarifying outcomes and designing for change - this includes articulating vision and goals for students, diagnosing the needs, defining a roadmap for change based in the intended student impact 

• Next we prototype interventions anchored in data, research, and learning questions

• We then Implement and test the interventions in multiple contexts, document observations, reflections & qualitative evidence, and gather feedback from our ‘users’

• We then analyze the design, delivery & effectiveness of the interventions, identify the variable conditions in the delivery to bring more rigor in implementation, and feed the results back to prototype design for iterative cycles of improvement.

• Finally once the solution has stabilised with sufficient evidence  we codify the design process the team undertook as well as codify the design and delivery of the specific intervention to start scaling it.

How are you currently tracking and measuring your solution’s impact?

Our overall approach to M&E is to monitor and evaluate progress of each local partnership using internal data systems and independent evaluations on three key areas -

A. Coalition Formation: are all enablers in place for a successful school transformation project e.g.,

• Program and roles aligned with the Partner

• Government approval received for the project

• Local partner team setup for the project

• Funding secured for launch (for both Kizazi and Partner)

B. Beneficiary Outcomes: are the projects delivering outcomes for students and other stakeholders

• Improvement in academic learning outcomes e.g., % students showing growth in grade level and learning level assessments

• Improvement in life outcomes e.g., % students showing growth on life skills assessment scale

• Improvement in student perception and feedback about classroom and school culture e.g., growth on the TRIPOD survey

• Shift in school and classroom practices e.g., % teachers consistently implementing desired teaching & learning strategies

• Shifts in community engagement and participation

C. Capacity for growth: is the project moving towards scale & sustainability

• School model design & codification: % benchmarks met for school model design

• Scale strategy: assessment of how robust local program scale strategy is

• Government relations: assessment of how invested local and national governments are in the project

• Long-term funding: assessment of dedicated and diversified funding for the local project (both for the local NGO and Kizazi)

• Actual expansion: number of new schools and students the program is reaching out to

Additionally, we also track other org wide indicators e.g., no. of students impacted by Kizazi, partner feedback. Ultimately, we measure the impact of the developed school models in transforming learning outcomes for children at scale.

One-line project summary:

Kizazi works with local innovators to offer a new approach to transforming public schools in under-resourced contexts towards broad student outcomes.

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Pitch your LEAP project: How and where would integrating evidence (or stronger evidence) into your theory of change increase your organization’s impact?

At Kizazi, we want to develop school models that enable thriving life for the children we serve. To achieve that we believe we need “breakthrough” schools that are an image of a transformed society in the communities that need them the most - schools that acknowledge and support the trauma and adversity that children come from to foster their holistic growth, bring in parents and communities as partners in each child’s learning at school and at home, and constantly innovate and question their approaches to teaching and learning. 

The first step in building such breakthrough schools is understanding the “theory of problem” unique to the context of each society and using that to define the “theory of change” or the kind of school models that we want to build. While we understand that schools cannot solve all challenges that children experience, we believe knowing and understanding the multidimensional and multigenerational context of the children and communities our schools serve, can greatly determine the outcomes that the schools work towards and the approaches to teaching and learning they choose. However, current approaches to diagnostics and needs analysis remain largely narrow in focus (only limited to classroom teaching and academic needs) thus limiting the vision of schools and education programs to begin with. 

Through the LEAP program, we want to develop an approach to conducting  deeper diagnoses of the systems we work with so that we can integrate stronger evidence of what children need into our school design process. This would translate into LEAP Fellows conducting mixed method research to develop a process of diagnostic and needs assessment of childrens’ experiences, schooling and community systems, and the wider areas that impact learning and wellbeing e.g., 

• Tools that capture aspirations and perceptions of children, parents, and teachers

• Tools that capture critical social indicators (e.g., nutrition, healthcare, safety) and the role they play in child’s everyday learning at school and home

• Codified process to administer and contextualise the diagnostic to each new geography

The Fellows would work on the research question - what approaches to system diagnosis enable deep, holistic, and comprehensive understanding of the challenges schools in under-resourced communities need to be working towards? More specifically, the application of this process would also enable us to answer some targeted questions we are currently looking at for each of our projects -

• Beyond the secondary literature, what are the challenges that girls in Sierra Leone and Nigeria face and how are these challenges preventing them from meaningful experiences in school and at home?

• What inhibits girls from having high aspirations in Armenia?

• What are the post-COVID challenges that girls face in India?

The successful outcome of this research project would enable us to strengthen our theory of change and develop school models that truly enable children to thrive in the four geographies we work in. It would also enable us to replicate the process to our new partnerships in Africa and Asia thus enabling us to deliver on our growth goals effectively.