Why doesn’t innovation and technology always work in low-income schools? — SILverlining Episode 3

Produced by Anwar Shadat and Raiya Ashraf

SILverlining: Tales of Innovation is a podcast from BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab on how to do frugal innovation at scale. From financial inclusion to behaviour change, this podcast brings together designers, thinkers and practitioners from the global South.

While digitization and virtual classrooms have been in conversation for some time, BRAC’s one-room classrooms have remained a working model for kids coming from low-tech, relatively low-literacy communities, providing students with enabling environments. With COVID-19 lockdowns, these schools have taken on a mobile learning model for the first time. In June 2020, SIL partnered with BRAC Education Programme and BRAC Technology to understand how teachers, students and their parents are faring through this transition, and how the programme should prepare for the future.

In the second of our two-part episode on innovations in education, we speak with resident SILies Salman Sabbab and nishat tasnim who delved in looking at schools for low-income communities differently during the pandemic. Their goal? Making BRAC’s schools more resilient and relevant for an everchanging and unpredictable world. Recorded in September 2020.

This podcast is available on SoundCloud and Spotify.