We sat down with our 2024 Yidan Prize for Education Development Laureates — Professor Mark Jordans, Marwa Zahr, and Luke Stannard — to learn more about the 'Can't Wait to Learn' intervention.

Could you tell us more about ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’?

Luke: ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’ has been around for just over 10 years now, starting in Sudan. It's a digital personalized learning platform that works predominantly offline but also online. And it supports children's learning in foundational literacy and numeracy in conflict-affected countries. It is and has been a labor of love for War Child as it has been iteratively developed over the last year through several teams of ‘Can't Wait to Learn’.

Its approach to evidence is hand-in-glove with regards to how we focus on evidence. We understand that education technology is not something in isolation. It's just part of an educational system. And ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ has worked and invested so much as a program over the last 10 years in eight contexts to contextualize, to align to national curriculums. And when we say contextualized, we mean co-design. It's useful to have that hook to the context that children understand, but it's also absolutely critical for community acceptance. And that means that it's building products with them, not for them.

What are some of the biggest educational needs in the countries you serve?

Marwa: I would say that one of the biggest needs is access to education. So with the UNHCR estimating that almost half of school-aged refugee children are out of school, this remains a very critical issue. With ‘Can't Wait to Learn’, we address this by providing mobile gamified learning which can be accessed offline and, also recently in Ukraine, through online distribution. This ensures that education reaches even the most remote and underserved children.

Another need I would say is the quality of the education, which is often compromised by the overcrowded classrooms, under-capacitated teachers, and even damaged infrastructure. So that's what ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ offers: personalized, contextually relevant content for the children and the teachers which ensures that they're engaged and that the content is relevant to them.

Another need is of course funding and resources. So we know that despite the magnitude of the educational crisis, funding for education in emergencies remains inadequate. So ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ offers cost-effective solutions that maximize the impact without the lengthy timeline.

One more point on the response to crisis. So we know that traditional education systems are not designed maybe to function effectively during crisis. So ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ provides a rapid and maybe more flexible education solution that can be implemented quickly. ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ enables the children to continue their education even when the teachers maybe are absent in the resources that are scarce.

Can you tell us more about the program’s impact on children’s learning outcomes?

Mark: We have been able to demonstrate to compare the outcomes of ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ to a group of children that did not get ‘Can't Wait to Learn’. And we did that in Uganda as the last step of our research in 30 schools that enrolled 1,500 — just a bit over 1,500 children — that got randomly allocated to either receiving ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ or not over a period of two terms. And what we saw is that we did see a significant improvement in literacy outcomes in the children that received ‘Can't Wait to Learn’ compared to those that didn't. And also in numeracy outcomes. So I think those are really very encouraging results.

How do you ensure the sustainability and scalability of the program in different parts of the world?

Luke: In terms of the sustainability, I think you have to be incredibly clear-eyed about who the duty bearers are in education systems. And they're not INGOs, and they're not education technology providers — they're governments. And we always work with them. So the government is the key stakeholder when we establish these programs. 

And so that's why the tool has to not be a War Child tool. The tool has to be a Ugandan tool. It has to be a Lebanese tool or a Jordanian tool. And so that investment — and it is an investment upfront — in terms of that contextualization piece, the research piece, and so forth that enables us to develop a sustainable product, because partners, government, and people we work with recognize that a curriculum-aligned system can be part of or a supplement to — never a replacement of — the education provision that's in place already. There's a scalability to it.

We've always and continue to look at how we can improve cost-effectiveness and that side of things. We absolutely have to know how much time children [spend] — we need to optimize the amount of time children use on a device that drops your cost per head.

What roles do local communities and educators play in the success of ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’?

Marwa: It's through educators and communities that they facilitate the use of ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’ in the communities. They help in guiding students through the content supporting their learning, providing the feedback. It's them who build the trust and engagement within the community. It's the local communities and educators that provide the feedback. And most importantly, it's through the communities that we ensure the sustainability and ownership of ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’.

It's only through local communities that you would ensure the sustainability of the program itself. We try to foster the sense of ownership and investment in the education process with our communities and with our partners, and it worked the best this way.