Across Zambia, students in lower primary grades (first through fourth) are struggling to catch up from the closures due to COVID-19. But even before the pandemic, more than half of students in grades three to five struggled to read basic words. While the reasons for this are systemic and multi-fold, and schools supported by Impact Network have been shown to perform better than other community schools, we continue to pilot new programs to help our most marginalized populations catch-up.

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Last month, Jane Goodall – the British primatologist, anthropologist and UN Messenger of Peace – celebrated her 87th birthday. Goodall was born in London, and had a fascination with animals from a very young age.

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Last month, baseball celebrated Jackie Robinson Day, and every Major League Baseball player donned a No. 42 jersey in his honor. It marks the anniversary of when Jackie Robinson broke the color line and became a starter for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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Last week, the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines reached Zambia and vaccination efforts started in full swing. It also marked my own first dose, taken at the Javits Center – a site typically used for conventions and conferences and now serving to protect 10,000 New Yorkers a day.

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Like many sporting events over the last year, the NetGirls Zambia league did not shoot any balls into village hoops for points and there was no league champion. While this is an unfortunate consequence of the pandemic, all was not lost! True to the aim of the program – “to empower and improve the lives of girls by providing opportunity for growth” – the team was able to pivot into other beneficial projects for women and girls.

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This week’s email comes from Bertha Phiri, our Curriculum Coordinator. She highlights the work of the Catch-Up program in Zambia, which is being rolled out across a number of provinces, with support from the Ministry of General Education, VVOB, and TaRL Africa.

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As we celebrate incredible women internationally this month, I recently revisited the movie Hidden Figures. The film is based off on a group of African-American female mathematicians who worked in the shadows at NASA to put a man on the moon.

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Have you ever wondered why some students disengage from learning while others do perfectly well? Have you ever asked a student who became disinterested with school for some reason?

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Today marks International Women’s Day, whose theme for 2021 is “Choose to Challenge”, a nod to the increasingly challenged world we all find ourselves in:

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Across the globe, investing in the earliest years of a child’s development has been proven to improve future learning outcomes and keep children in school longer. Early Childhood Education (ECE) supports cognitive and socio-emotional developments during early childhood, where the brain matures faster than any other time in life.

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This week, we celebrated what would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday.

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My name is Promise Makala, Head of Academics at Impact Network. I grew up in the Mtendere neighborhood of Lusaka, Zambia. During my primary school education, I struggled in literacy and numeracy and I was one of the students who performed poorly

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I recently read an article about Fela Kuti’s son and grandson, who are about to release an album linking three generations of musicians together, and how they are reimagining their musical dynasty.

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Literacy is freedom; it helps to make a world of free thinkers and a democratic future. Where literacy is limited, and ignorance is involved, we are making a future of limited-thinking people who can easily be controlled by their free- thinking counterparts.

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Over the last few weeks, our curriculum team has been focused on planning for 2021 – given the COVID crisis, our students will have a lot to catch up on (there will be more to come on this in coming weeks!). And in a time when my own son is learning how to read, it got me thinking about when I started to love to read!

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As we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend, I hope that each of you are finding a way to celebrate his life and legacy,

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In the midst of this week, I remained in awe of the organizers and volunteers that hustled in Georgia to flip the senate and elect the state’s first African American Senator and first Jewish Senator – led by the remarkable Stacy Abrams. Their stories have been somewhat overshadowed this week – and I wanted to give them a voice today.

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As we close the books on a dark 2020 across the world, I’ve been reflecting on the silver linings of the year – both personally and for Impact Network. Of all of my years with Impact Network, this has been the most challenging. Pursuing our mission to provide quality education in the face of a worldwide pandemic, school closures, daily power cuts, and difficult economic circumstances has been arduous. But it has also captured some of my proudest moments leading an incredible team of management staff, teacher trainers, operations coordinators, and teachers.

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