“Is one of the downsides of focusing so heavily on outcomes… that other education outcomes, less easy to measure perhaps, are deprioritized, if not lost completely?”
The above resonated with me, and was the source of some challenges and frustrations in deploying RBF dollars that had great ambitions.
Thanks Karim for this comment. Inevitably, if focus narrows to learning outcomes (and those are themselves narrowly defined) then much that is important, but hard to easily measure, about education and the development of the child, gets either de-prioritised or overlooked. EOF claims to have a broader view of "outcomes" and in India the Educate Girls work is focused on access and retention of girls allowing for more qualitative assessments - but....OBF by it's nature is about focus. Given the truly awful state of children's learning worldwide I have sympathy for an approach that asks everyone concentrate on getting the basics right.
Thanks for sharing your analysis of OBF, Andy. It's very timely you have researched and published this just at the moment when conventional aid flows to education and other sectors are in such short and fragile supply.
You're not wrong about governments having an opportunity to lean in, but by some measures they only account for perhaps 15% of global wealth now - which is around half of the proportion when we started out back in the day! So it's the challenge of unlocking the other c 85% of private corporations' and individuals' wealth that we all need to work on, in my view...
“Is one of the downsides of focusing so heavily on outcomes… that other education outcomes, less easy to measure perhaps, are deprioritized, if not lost completely?”
The above resonated with me, and was the source of some challenges and frustrations in deploying RBF dollars that had great ambitions.
Thanks Karim for this comment. Inevitably, if focus narrows to learning outcomes (and those are themselves narrowly defined) then much that is important, but hard to easily measure, about education and the development of the child, gets either de-prioritised or overlooked. EOF claims to have a broader view of "outcomes" and in India the Educate Girls work is focused on access and retention of girls allowing for more qualitative assessments - but....OBF by it's nature is about focus. Given the truly awful state of children's learning worldwide I have sympathy for an approach that asks everyone concentrate on getting the basics right.
Thanks for sharing your analysis of OBF, Andy. It's very timely you have researched and published this just at the moment when conventional aid flows to education and other sectors are in such short and fragile supply.
You're not wrong about governments having an opportunity to lean in, but by some measures they only account for perhaps 15% of global wealth now - which is around half of the proportion when we started out back in the day! So it's the challenge of unlocking the other c 85% of private corporations' and individuals' wealth that we all need to work on, in my view...
Very interesting piece !
Thanks Mathilde, glad you liked it!