Why did you create this innovation?

Even prior to COVID-19, 59 million primary school aged children were out of school globally. Often excluded due to crisis, poverty, or discrimination, these children are at risk of being forgotten or ignored as they are assumed to be uneducable. The Luminos Fund provides second chance education to these out-of-school children.

How does your innovation work in practice?

The Speed School program aims to change community and global mindsets so that it becomes unacceptable for any child to be denied an education.

Working in countries with the highest rates of out-of-school children, our classrooms provide an accelerated learning program that condenses three years of foundational literacy and numeracy into just 10 months and prepares students as life-long learners. Having caught up with their peers, children are able to re-enter mainstream education at 3rd or 4th grade and join the local village schools with children their own age.

This program’s long-term impact is significant. Luminos has enabled 147,327+ students to re-enter mainstream education, and a University of Sussex evaluation has shown that graduates of the program complete primary school at twice the rate of their peers.

How has it been spreading?

The impact of the model has led the Ethiopian Ministry of Education to adopt it as a national strategy to reach out-of-school children. We are training government teachers and government officials at all levels in the Speed School pedagogy so that, in future years, the Ministry of Education can implement the program independently.

Since a successful 2017-18 pilot, in which the government operated 32 Speed School classes to reach 960 students, the government is now scaling their adoption of our model nationally to reach thousands of children with transformative, joyful, catch-up education.

The Speed School model was originated through a collaborative effort of the Stromme Foundation, Geneva Global, Luminos’ founder, and dozens of in-country local partners. In addition to Ethiopia and Liberia, versions of the program have been implemented in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Uganda. Plans for 2021 are to expand the program other regions and countries, further demonstrating its wide relevance and impact.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

We recommend these steps:
01: Engage local government and stakeholders
02: Identify Local Implementing Partner(s)
03: Identify qualifying communities
04: Identify and recruit out-of-school children
05: Acquire classroom space
06: Refine the curriculum
07: Recruit and train teachers to lead classes
08: Teach class
09: Engage parents and guardians
10: Monitor and evaluate