EdTech Hub Call for Concept Notes: Implementation research in new thematic areas

Description

EdTech Hub is a global non-profit research partnership supported by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, Canada's International Development Research Centre, and others. Our goal is to empower people making decisions about technology in education in LMICs. Technology has the potential to help address the global learning crisis, but that potential is not being realised. Policy makers and other decision makers face an overwhelming choice of technology solutions, are unclear on what works and what doesn't and are forced to make decisions based on low- or no-evidence. Further information about the Hub is available at https://edtechhub.org/ To further expand available evidence on the use of EdTech to support the most marginalised, the Hub will be launching a round of implementation research partnerships focusing on new thematic areas. These areas include: Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND), education in emergencies, and education resilience against climate change. Implementation research examines how interventions-policies, programs, or practices-are carried into effect. While established in fields like healthcare and poverty alleviation, it remains underexplored in EdTech, particularly in LMICs. This approach generates evidence in real-time, enhances scalability, and prioritizes sustainability, distinguishing itself from evaluation or design-based research. Lot 1: EdTech Hub will engage partners who are implementing EdTech interventions in these thematic areas, and co-design implementation research partnerships with them. These partnerships will generate rigorous, practical evidence on how EdTech can improve teaching, strengthen education systems, and, ultimately, children's learning outcomes. Those submitting concept notes (2-5 pages in length) should be implementing EdTech interventions in one or more LMICs. The concept note should describe the intervention and the research questions they propose to answer through an implementation research partnership. They should also describe their organisation's capacity to contribute to the implementation research (beyond doing the implementation itself) through, for example, data collection, ongoing monitoring, complementary research efforts, in-house research or M&E capacity, etc. This should include the amount of funding they would need to support their component of the implementation research. Importantly, the concept note should describe the potential impact of the implementation research with regard to scalability, sustainability, evidence generation, etc. Interested parties should reach out to the contact listed below if they would like to have a meeting with the EdTech Hub team about the implementation research partnerships before submitting a concept note.