In December, three major initiatives were announced with AKF as a partner organization at the 28th annual Climate Change Conference (COP). AKF and other agencies of the AKDN joined over 70,000 delegates in Dubai for two-week event which hosted global leaders and a myriad of important sessions on the climate crisis.
The three educationally-focused climate efforts were:
- Global Education Solutions Accelerator (GESA), with partner Dubai Cares, which is an effort to fast-track education transformation across ten countries (Afghanistan, Brazil, India, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Tanzania, and Uganda). AKF will serve as the strategic partner using its flagship program, Schools2030.
- CO-CREATE (Collaborative Opportunities for Climate Resilience, Empowerment, and Transformation through Education in Tanzania), which is a joint effort between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to develop and test innovative solutions to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on girls’ education. This program will also be delivered through AKF’s Schools 2030 initiative.
- Teachersfortheplanet.org, a new online portal to keep teachers at the center of climate education, launched by AKF and partners Teach For All, Dubai Cares, and the Learning Planet Institute.
AKF will be covering progress and will post more details on these projects as they are rolled out.
Schools2030, which began as an initiative in 2020, has spent its first three years consolidating the model and tools that CO-CREATE will strengthen and scale. Now, as Schools2030 enters its second phase of ‘connecting schools to systems’ (from 2024-2026), Schools2030 will expand its networks and create incubation and scaling frameworks that can also support the expansion of CO-CREATE and further its impact into other geographies. Using these networks and tools, AKF will build evidence on ‘what works’ to support climate resilience in and through education and will disseminate information on best practices to encourage scale and wider impact.