Focus on the Community School Concept in Zambia: Providing Access to Early Child Education through Open Community Schools

Open Community Schools are community-led efforts to widen access to education. They are community-owned and seek to address the challenge of access to education of children in under-served rural communities. The Zambia Open Community Schools (ZOCS) and the Reformed Open Community Schools (ROCS) follow this structure but are now embedded and are recognized as important stakeholders in widening access to organized learning and early childhood education and early grades for children across Zambia. ZOCs are currently working with 1,800 community schools in Zambia and have enhanced school enrolment by about 57%.

With support from the Roger Federer Foundation, ZOCS and ROCS are implementing the School Readiness Initiative (SRI) to expand access to early education at the community level. This podcast will help us understand how ZOCS and ROCS are pushing the lever in widening education access in Zambia. We will interrogate the implementation of the School Readiness Initiative (SRI) a key project helping with access to organized learning for some of the most disadvantaged children in Zambia, and what other countries could learn.