Geneva Global is part of Global Impact Ventures
Education Initiatives > Approach
We work from the classroom to the ministry to cultivate simultaneously children’s cognitive, practical, and personal development; in other words, the head, the hand, and the heart. We promote truly holistic learning to ready students to excel in their future schooling, lives, and livelihoods.
Serving children who either dropped out of primary school before acquiring basic literacy and numeracy or who have never attended school, Speed School provides them the first three years of primary schooling in just ten months.
In Speed School classes, these children acquire the core academic aptitudes, motivation, and confidence to join their age peers in the government school, where many excel. At the same time, the Speed School model strengthens the capacity, confidence, and commitment of the pupils’ mothers to support their children’s onward schooling financially, practically, and morally.
Education and other government leaders at the central, regional, and local levels, external partners, and beneficiaries all agree that Speed School has been a large success. This is evident in a variety of ways, ranging from the performance of individual children to system-level impacts:
Over 350,000 out-of-school children have acquired core literacy and numeracy.
On average, 75% of Speed School completers enter Grade 4 each year and another 15% enter Grade 3
Former Speed School pupils typically occupy the top ranks of their classes in academic performance, attendance, and progression to higher grades
Former Speed School pupils are recognized as school leaders and model members of their communities
What began as an ambitious effort to bring tens of thousands of out-of-school children back into formal primary education (or into school for the first time) has now become a promising effort to attain the Holy Grail of development: government adoption with sustainability and scale. In both Ethiopia and Uganda, Geneva Global is working with the Ministry of Education and its leaders in the regions where Speed School operates to hand over full operational and financial responsibility for the Speed School program. (Presently, over 80% of all Speed School classes in Ethiopia are funded and implemented by the government.)
At the same time, Geneva Global aspires to support its current and new philanthropic and other development clients to introduce the Speed School model into new countries.
The Speed School facilitators use activity-based, learner-centered instructional methods and perform continuous formative assessment in every lesson.
Self-Help Groups mobilize and motivate the mothers and other guardians of Speed School pupils to grow and save their limited resources while taking other actions to support their children’s formal education.
The condensed curriculum strips the official curriculum for the primary grades to the core learning outcomes and thematic content, leaving the facilitator to complete lessons with information, illustrations, and applications drawn from the local context.
The holistic training approach combines highly practical workshop training with a dialogic approach to teacher supervision and individual and collective reflective practice by teachers for continuous professional development and improvement.
