KAMPALA – Twaweza, a regional initiative with presence in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda is set to launch a brief on Positive Deviance in Uganda’s Primary Schools on Tuesday, August 27 in Kampala.
Twaweza has chosen Positive Deviance (PD) as a strategy to unearth evidence-based and user-driven ideas to improve learning, at community, school and teacher levels.
According to Ms Martha Chemutai, Twaweza’s Communications Officer, the NGO has been working on ensuring that children learn and authorities become more open and responsive to citizens’ needs.
“During the event, we will introduce the positive deviance approach methodology and share the strategies and stories unearthed during the past two years,” reads an excerpt from Twaweza.
The event is slated to take place on Tuesday next week at Hotel Africana and will commence at 7:00 am.
The brief to be launched is titled: How are some children learning when most are not: Positive Deviance in Uganda’s Primary Schools.
“The aim is to identify strategies that were innovated at and are being employed in schools that defy the norm, significantly outperforming their peers despite similar resource levels and contexts,” said Ms. Chemutai in a statement.
The underlying thinking is that some communities, schools and teachers in districts with consistently poor learning outcomes have devised strategies and practices that are enabling them to achieve better learning outcomes for their children while using similar levels of resources.
This launch will bring together teachers, headteachers, officials from relevant government ministries, departments and agencies, development partners, civil society, the media and ordinary Ugandans to discuss these strategies and the role they can play in improving learning for all school-going children in Uganda, as well as the merits of the positive deviance approach overall.
The Twaweza team hopes that the insights gained from this launch will filter into wider public discussions and not only inform education policy design but also to help shape actual implementation in schools and classrooms across Uganda.
