As the UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, we conduct research to inform policymaking and implementation. This project brief summarizes our research on the Let Us Learn project.

1. PROJECT BRIEF
Let Us Learn
How do you deliver quality
learning to the most
vulnerable and hardest
to reach children?

2. Overview
While access to education has expanded greatly
in the last two decades, for many of the hardest to
reach children around the world access to learning
remains largely out of reach. In 2019, over 258
million children were out of school and an additional
175 million young children were left out of
preprimary education.The Let Us Learn initiative
aims to pilot test innovative and effective measures
to deliver and improve learning for vulnerable
children in five countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh,
Liberia, Madagascar and Nepal. Let Us Learn
programmes provide support across the education
lifecycle, from early childhood education to
primary, through secondary and vocational training.
Programmes are targeted to the hardest to reach
communities to provide learning pathways to out
of school children and support to children at risk of
dropping out.
Approach
The Let Us Learn project undertakes mixed methods
research to build evidence on what works across the
‘education lifecycle’, to uncover critical strategies to
deliver quality education in the most marginalized
communities.
In the pre-primary years Let Us Learn works on
expanding opportunities in hard-to-reach rural areas.
Measures for expansion of flexible learning systems
for out of school children are being tested to bring
children back into a learning pathway, especially
for girls, at-risk children transitioning to secondary
school, and vulnerable children from hard-to-reach
areas.
We are exploring measures to improve system
strengthening with a focus on educational outcomes
for the most marginalized. VocationalTraining
and skills development programmes provide out
of school adolescents with job-specific life skills
through on-the-job training and instruction. Let Us
Learn tackles bottlenecks within national education
systems to boost retention, access, teacher quality
and early grade learning.
Goal
Working in partnership with UNICEF education
teams at global and national level the Let Us
Learn project seeks to embed research into project
supported programmes to strengthen evidence-ba-
sed decision-making in severely vulnerable
education settings.
Project Highlights
Let Us Learn (2021)
We are building evidence on accelerated
learning, catch up and remedial program-
mes to understand what works to bring
vulnerable children onto a learning
pathway. Research in each participating
country (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Liberia,
Madagascar and Nepal) will culminate
in country-specific research briefs and a
cross-country research report exploring
the innovations these programmes
undertook in order to bring learning to the
most vulnerable children.
PROJECT BRIEF
Contact Info
Thomas Dreesen
Education Manager
tdreesen@unicef.org
Marco Valenza
Education Research Associate
mavalenza@unicef.org