Through local partnerships, Notre Dame researchers seek solutions to global poverty

This story was originally published by Wendy Wilson for the Keough School of Global Affairs. To view the original story, please click here.

Education study in Africa prioritizes local engagement in Kenya, Senegal and Uganda.

Collaborative research that engages partners on the ground can produce impactful interventions and promising innovations. That’s why the University of Notre Dame is partnering with cutting-edge organizations in three sub-Saharan African countries to improve education outcomes for children on a new project to improve education outcomes and address poverty.

The project, “Graduating from Learning Poverty” seeks to respond to the learning crisis in low- and middle-income contexts, where large numbers of children are failing to acquire foundational skills. Leveraging the insights and community connections of local partners is a crucial part of the project, which is funded by the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative, a University-wide effort to create a world intolerant of poverty by expanding knowledge about how to solve it.

A partnership-driven approach will ensure that research designs are grounded in the realities and challenges local partners must attend to, researchers said. By demonstrating what works at scale and how to make programs more effective, it can support continuous improvement of solutions and yield a wider impact.

TJ D’Agostino, assistant professor of the practice at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and a core faculty affiliate of the school’s Pulte Institute for Global Development, is leading the project. He said it aims to facilitate meaningful impact on education policy and practice.

D’Agostino believes this outcome can best be achieved through close collaboration with outstanding implementers and educational innovators in the places where learning poverty remains a serious challenge. This includes countries such as Kenya, Uganda and Senegal.

“To succeed, we must develop and nurture close relationships with strong partners and support and strengthen their work while also generating knowledge and lessons for the field that will yield policy impact,” D’Agostino said. “We believe we can do this by nurturing sustained relationships with innovative local partners.”

The project’s cross-disciplinary research team also includes Maurice Sikenyi, an education and global development scholar from Kenya who serves as the assistant director of the Ford Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity at the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies; Patrizio Piraino, professor of education, labor, and development at the Keough School and the director of the Ford Program; and Fernanda Soares, assistant research professor with the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child, part of the University’s Institute for Educational Initiatives.

Stewarding long-term partnerships for meaningful results

Sikenyi agreed that partnerships were critical to the project's success. Ultimately, he said, they will enable Notre Dame to address key gaps in education policy.

“While past studies have identified effective strategies for improving foundational learning, significant gaps remain in implementing and scaling these practices cost-effectively and sustainably across diverse contexts,” Sikenyi said. “Our research seeks to address these gaps”

Partner selection is a critical step in the project process, and funding from the Poverty Initiative afforded a welcome degree of flexibility, researchers said. Candidate organizations across countries were specifically considered for their potential to support the work’s long-term impact.

In the end, the partner organization in each country was one with which Notre Dame faculty had worked in the past, reflecting the work’s human dimension, D’Agostino said, adding that this helped to facilitate trust and collaboration.

Building Tomorrow, an education nonprofit based in Kampala, Uganda, is among the partners. Co-founder and Country Director Joseph B. Kaliisa said more than half a million primary school students have already received literacy and numeracy programming through its community-based delivery model since 2018. He looks forward to the group’s continued impact through its inclusive camps in schools supported with discoveries made through the study.

“It is an honor to better Uganda’s educational landscape while working alongside my colleagues to build solutions that inspire hope, foster equity and drive lasting change,” he said. “We are deeply grateful for Notre Dame’s research investment in Building Tomorrow and look forward to learning from their insights.”

Soares said the project’s emphasis on these long-term partnerships ensures that research strengthens local capacity while informing both policy and practice.

“This approach moves beyond extractive research models,” Soares said, “and fosters scaling as well as broader systems change.”

Piraino said that the project’s partnership-driven approach made sense for Notre Dame.

"This kind of project is an excellent fit for the Ford Program because it exemplifies the type of work we pursue: Collaborating with local communities in an accountable way to support the goals our partners have articulated,” Piraino said. “This helps ensure our research not only supports but actively prioritizes human dignity.”

The essence of co-creating research lives in dialogue, the exchange of hopes and priorities for the work between university and local partners across countries. To facilitate this, Notre Dame researchers began by asking questions of collaborating organizations to understand what they needed.

Prioritizing partner needs in projects

The organic result of this collaborative process was three studies tailored for each specific country and across the three partner organizations:

Kenya

With the ultimate goal of building evidence-based approaches into institutional practice on a broad scale, research efforts are focusing new intervention being led by regional and country offices of the Government of Kenya in collaboration with two long-time Notre Dame research partners, the University of Nairobi and local Zizi Afrique Foundation. In addition to examining the benefits of the intervention’s unique approach to teaching at the right level, this research will explore the benefits of a government-led, local-nongovernmental organization-supported model from the start of the intervention and its implications for scaling and sustainability.

Senegal

The summer break for primary schools in Senegal is significantly longer than the average, which increases the likelihood of summer learning loss among students. Research efforts will focus on the severity of this learning loss and on an intervention being implemented by the Association for Research in Education for Development, which has the potential to mitigate and counter summer learning loss. Evidence gained through the study will help partners better understand the intervention’s impact, but will also help make a case to policymakers with the ability to scale up the work, improving education outcomes.

Uganda

Building Tomorrow, a foundation leading work in education research and reform focused on teaching at the right level approaches to improve foundational literacy and mathematics, is playing a leading role in scaling the approach in Uganda’s low-income, rural communities. Expanding on a recent Notre Dame-led randomized controlled trial, which demonstrates Building Tomorrow’s programming and impact to explore the sustainability of the impact and how to improve uptake by communities and local government.

Addressing contextual differences to create large-scale solutions

Ultimately, D’Agostino said, the project’s partner-driven approach means that its outputs are deeply rooted within the communities they’re intended to serve. Consequently, he said, they are informed, sustained and improved by the people who live in these communities.

“Understanding the mechanisms through which an intervention is or isn’t effective is necessary to plan for adjustments to support the success of programs at scale,” he said. “To get under the hood of the intervention and make it work more consistently at scale — while also innovating and testing new ideas, and periodically evaluating designs through rigorous evaluation — that's what we need to focus on to propel the field forward. It is an honor to pursue this important work alongside our partners.”