Unfortunately, too many children lack essential literacy skills that could open up future opportunities. The Benjamin Piper Foundation supports grantees working to enhance education systems across the world.
Global Education Initiatives (GEIs) are multifaceted educational projects which combine academic, practical and research components in order to foster students’ global awareness and international competencies while supporting campus efforts for internationalization.
1. Invest in Talent
Investment in talent development makes good business sense; trained team members can add greater value to any organization. Companies should design their talent development strategy around current objectives, future goals and how employees will need to fulfill them.
Urgent action are needed to improve education systems in emerging market economies and low-income countries, both of which constitute public goods that the global community – including companies – should help fund, in addition to what governments or international aid programs can provide.
As technology transforms our world, it will become essential that workers possess the necessary skills and knowledge for success in a rapidly transforming economy. This may require upskilling of existing employees as well as training programs designed to develop new capabilities.
Additionally, global education is essential to equipping individuals for today’s increasingly interdependent and complex world. This encompasses traditional disciplines (such as science and social sciences) that help people better comprehend the environment they inhabit (like sciences or social sciences), while simultaneously broadening understandings on how best to relate to our planet – including learning how to reduce carbon emissions or adopt sustainable diets. Furthermore, global competency should prepare people to act on their own as global citizens – from understanding climate change impacts them directly through to advocating solutions – whether that means slowing population growth or reducing CO emissions.
2. Partner with Local Schools
Last week, over 100 countries descended upon Dakar, Senegal for the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) replenishment conference. Amidst rising isolationism trends, this event reinforced international collaboration.
Ashoka brought together “education change leaders” as it is commonly known, to find new ways of connecting, sharing learning, and uniting behind an effort that fosters holistic education. They convened at an airport-style hotel featuring several hundred seats as they enjoyed short thematic presentations, networking opportunities, formal pledges by governments to work towards shared goals as well as formal announcements that they were taking steps together towards them.
Though the conference pledged $2.3 billion towards education, this amount falls far short of UNESCO estimates for providing quality learning experiences to every child living in low-income countries. Let us hope that renewed focus on this key sector leads to increased investment.
Schools seeking to foster global competence among their students should prioritize several strategic objectives. First, schools must clearly outline what an ideal global leader or graduate looks like for their community – Piney Creek School in rural Western North Carolina created an adaptable framework that enables districts to customize plans to the unique needs of each district; similarly, University of Nebraska established the Global Experiences Office that promotes experiential learning opportunities both domestically and abroad and unifies campus communities around their overarching aims, strategies, and targets.
3. Invest in Technology
Technology holds immense promise to revolutionize global education, offering impact investors a window of opportunity. Some examples include creating technologies that enhance educational quality while increasing access, streamlining administrative processes for schools and systems overall, as well as increasing accessibility and inclusion (for instance by creating remote learning systems).
Morgan Stanley believes educational technology to be one of the most crucial investments. Edtech–which includes IT tools and teaching practices used for in-classroom and remote learning–is projected to reach $620 billion by 2030 thanks to increased internet access, rapid adoption among teachers and students and high scalability.
Investing in education technology can close the value gap and increase efficiency for businesses in low- and middle-income nations, particularly those located in lower and middle income regions. At present there exists a large disparity between global government investment in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) from higher income regions and those from lower and middle income regions; investing here could result in more agile, accessible, equitable STI that benefits everyone involved.
At the Transforming Education Summit held by the Coalition in 2022, many partners came together around a shared goal of working directly with Ministry of Education officials to co-develop sustainable plans for digital transformation in each respective country. A new subgroup known as Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC) was then created.
4. Create a Community
Global education aims to educate its students about the world’s cultures, geographies and histories while emphasizing interconnectivity among peoples and communities. Furthermore, it cultivates skills such as empathy, understanding of other perspectives and being able to identify and address global challenges.
Education can also enable students to become engaged members of society and contribute to making it a more sustainable, peaceful, and equitable world – leading to what many refer to as “soft power”.
The United States must lead by creating an interagency presidential initiative on global education as part of U.S. foreign assistance. Now is an opportune moment for investing in global education; key building blocks have already been laid over the last eight years: an international body to monitor student learning; new data about school systems around the world and who is and isn’t attending; and reformed Global Partnership for Education (GPE), which began its replenishment cycle this year.
Additionally, the Obama White House has highlighted this topic through the Let Girls Learn initiative and United States Agency for International Development is updating their education strategy accordingly. Furthermore, global education transcends partisan politics and remains one of the few issues with widespread bipartisan support.
