KIX regional hubs

The Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), a joint endeavour between the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and IDRC, aims to contribute to the improvement of education policy and practice in the Global South. 

The sharing and exchange of knowledge is one of KIX’s key functions. Country representatives share information, innovations, and best practices for education policy and programming and to inform knowledge gaps and policy priorities.

Four regional hubs, each managed by a regional learning partner, act as knowledge brokering units for KIX. Each hub represents a cluster of GPE partner countries and functions as a regional forum to facilitate cross-country knowledge exchange and mobilization, learning, synthesis, and collaboration among key national education stakeholders. The overall objectives and responsibilities of the hubs include:

• foster demand-driven regional knowledge exchange and strengthen the capacity of hub members to identify, use, share, and mobilize evidence related to priority policy challenges;   

• produce relevant knowledge and evidence syntheses and disseminate these to relevant actors; and  

• mobilize and position regional knowledge and evidence for uptake. 

Other activities include:

• Conducting education system reviews;

• establishing digital exchange platforms; and

• developing a regional call-to-action to define the priorities of education stakeholders.

The regional hubs also support another core component of the program — funding. The hubs serve as a funding mechanism that provides grants at global and regional levels to invest in knowledge generation and innovation and to scale up proven approaches.

KIX’s four regional hubs

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) - International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa, which promotes international collaboration in education, sciences, and culture to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights, along with fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.

• The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) - Eastern and Southern Africa, which provides humanitarian and developmental aid to children around the world.

• The African Union, which is made up of 55 member states that encompass the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). ADEA, a pan-African institution built on partnerships between African ministries of education and training and their technical and external partners, aims to act as a catalyst for reforms and promising policies and practices by pooling ideas, experiences, lessons learned, and knowledge.

• Institut de la Francophonie pour l’éducation et la formation (IFEF), which contributes to the development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of national education policies. IFEF facilitates capacity-building activities for actors in the education sector and strengthens the capacities of governments and partners to improve the quality of French-language education programs in member countries of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

• Conférence des ministres de l’Éducation des États et gouvernements de la Francophonie, which are biennial ministerial meetings that aim to guide the development of educational policies in member countries of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

•  L’Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), which is a global network of French-speaking higher-education and research institutions that supports cooperation and solidarity among French-speaking universities and other academic institutions. The AUF has 944 members located throughout Francophone countries, made up of public and private universities, institutes of higher education, research centres and institutions, institutional networks, and networks of university administrators.

KIX EAP manages the hub that oversees activities in GPE-partner countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia and Asia-Pacific. One organization leads this hub: 

• The Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training (NORRAG) is a global membership-based network. NORRAG’s core mandate and strength is producing, disseminating, and brokering critical knowledge and building capacity among the wide range of stakeholders that constitute the network. These stakeholders inform and shape education policies and practice at national and international levels. They are united by a shared commitment to principles of social justice, equity, and quality in education.

• SUMMA, created in 2016 by the Inter-American Development Bank and Fundación Chile, with the support of the education ministries of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. As the first education research and innovation laboratory for Latin America and the Caribbean, SUMMA’s mission is to increase the quality, equity, and inclusion of educational systems in the region by improving the decision-making process for educational policies and practices.

• The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which is dedicated to economic harmonization and integration, protecting human and legal rights, and encouraging good governance among independent and non-independent countries in the eastern Caribbean. OECS currently has 11 members spread across the region: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the British Virgin Islands.

For more information on the hubs and their activities, visit https://www.gpekix.org/regional-hubs 

Contact: kix@idrc.ca