4min chapter

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Episode 6: Silvia Bastante de Unverhau discusses funding systems change

The Ashoka Systems Change Podcast

CHAPTER

Supporting Social Change Initiatives in Healthcare and Education

Exploring the support and funding of impactful social change projects including the Liberia Health Assistance Coalition and the Teaching at the Right Level program, aiming to improve community health care and enhance learning outcomes in public schools.

00:00
Speaker 2
We come back to that maybe a little later, maybe some focus tips for social change on entrepreneurs, but can you maybe just talk a little bit about one or two of your first projects? What was it that you found particularly convincing about them? And being on the receiving end of pitches, I suppose, maybe if you're any general comments, you've alluded a little bit to this, as to how aware the entrepreneurs were themselves and how they're approached in pitching, but it really is the projects that I'm most interested in. Yeah,
Speaker 1
for sure. I can give you a couple of programs that we're supporting and our first round of grants. So one example, for example, is the Liberia Health Assistance Coalition, which the Secretariat is an organization called Last Mile Health. Now, in Liberia, which has had a complicated history, and it's also a difficult context in Africa, one of the biggest issues is still childhood mortality. So the numbers that I know is one in seven children dies before their first year, which is quite high even for a developing country. And this initiative is focusing on community health care workers, which has been proven in many contexts as a very cost-effective way of delivering health care in the last mile. Now what I understand is that in Liberia, after the Ebola crisis, there were 47 different NGO implemented community health care worker projects, which doesn't really make a lot of sense if we want to achieve a certain level of efficiency and which scale and cover the whole country. Now there is a coalition of five NGOs, and the leader of the coalition is, or the Secretariat for the coalition, is Last Mile Health, working with the Ministry of Health and with the Ministry of Finance, and the government is fully committed to extending health care to every single rural Liberia. There is also the Global Fund that is contributing in the space, and it's implementing some of the work throughout the country. And it's a coordinated approach, and it's a plan that over five years, the whole ownership of the program, which is partly already in the government's hands, because they are already paying for the stipends for the community health care workers, the full ownership transfers to the government, and it becomes a national model of how to extend health care to the last mile. So that's, for example, one of the initiatives that we supported in the first round. Another one that I can mention is a coalition that was formed by Pratham, and my MIT Forward the Action Lab, J-PAL. Essentially, Pratham pioneered a way to do differentiated learning for children in the same classroom, in a public sector setting. It's called teaching at the right level, which is a way in which teachers can give an individualized test to each child to see exactly where they are in terms of reading and maths, and then give them exercises and make them work in small groups and give them exercises tailored to where they are. And this is a way of ensuring that every single child that goes to school actually learns the basics of reading and maths, without which a lot more is not possible. And we've seen amazing statistics of different countries that say that a high percentage of kids that even graduate from primary school cannot read and write properly. And this obviously doesn't give them a very good starting point. So Pratham, this major NGO in India, was actually founded by Madhav Shavan, who is a Neshoka fellow, developed this methodology called teaching at the right level. And then the MIT Forward the Action Lab, J-PALDI evaluations. And now they form the consortium between the two organizations called Teaching at the Right Level Africa. And they are providing technical assistance in six different countries for the governments to implement this methodology. I think they're national education systems. Right.

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