BRAC’s executive director, Dr Muhammad Musa said, “For education to be able to serve the future of our communities, we need to empower teachers, methodologies, practitioners and more importantly mindsets, in order to solve real problems with simple, frugal solutions, that include the under-privileged communities of the present world,” today on Saturday at the closing day of a 3-day international event on educational innovations organised at Savar, Dhaka.
Focusing on scaling up quality education, BRAC organized the programme titled ‘Frugal Innovation Forum 2017’ in 9-11 November 2017 at Savar CDM. The first day of the event was spent in the field, while discussions comprising 17 sessions were held in the next two days.
Primary and mass education minister, Advocate Mostafizur Rahman MP inaugurated the discussion sessions on Friday, which primarily focused on the potentials of different kinds of innovations to ensure quality education across the world. Educationists and innovators from Bangladesh, Australia, India, Nepal and South Africa presented 11 innovative models of quality education. Over 200 development activists, social entrepreneurs, educationists and researchers participated in discussions on the innovative approaches and projects adopted in the education systems of different countries around the world.
A special session on the education of refugee children titled ‘The displaced demographic: Classrooms for every child’ was held on the closing day. Abdul Moktader, Project Director, Save the Children Bangladesh; Jacqueline Strecker, Learn Lab Manager, UNHCR, and Mohammad Mohsin, ECD Specialist, UNICEF Bangladesh, were the speakers of the session.
Later on the closing day executive director of BRAC, Dr Muhammad Musa attended a session titled ‘Future of Education’. Dr James Tooley, professor of education policy at the University of Newcastle and Anir Chowdhury, policy adviser to the Access to Information (a2i) Programme at the Prime Minister’s Office, also spoke at this session.
Dr Safiqul Islam, director of BRAC’s education programme, Ian Attfield, senior education adviser of DFID Education Policy Team, and Fathima Dada, global managing director of English and Schools, Pearson, were the speakers at this session titled ‘Shifting sands in global education across the world’.
Another important session from the second day called ‘Public private partnership in education – Lessons learnt from the region’ included Aashti Zaidi Hai, director of Global Schools Forum, Lee Crawfurd, head of research and evaluation of Ark Education Partnerships Group, Md Afzal Hossain Sarwar, policy specialist for educational innovation at Access to Information Programme at the Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh, and Shweta Anand Arora, director of The Education Alliance, as the speakers.
Asif Saleh, senior director for strategy, communications and empowerment of BRAC and BRAC International, gave the closing remarks of the event.
The BRAC Social Innovation Lab (SIL) has been organising Frugal Innovation Forum for the last four years (since 2013) with focus on pressing social issues. This year, the Bangla daily, Prothom Alo was the associate partner of the event while Global Schools Forum acted as the knowledge partner.
