2021 ANNUAL REPORT

Resilience in the Age of the Pandemic

2021 marked the second year of the pandemic and Impact Network continued to persevere in the face of obstacles. The school year kicked off with a comprehensive teacher training before the school year started in February. While we did experience some closures and delays due to COVID-19, we are so proud that we were able to reconfigure our curriculum so that students did not lose teaching time. We were also able to pilot some of the most innovative and impactful programs in our decade-long history. And we were thrilled to be featured in the press for our efforts.

This year showed that Impact Network could recover from the pandemic, audaciously try new things, and continue our mission to provide every child with a quality education.

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Impact Education: Strengthening the eSchool 360

In 2021, we continued to improve our eSchool 360 model and adapt to an ever-changing landscape due to the ongoing pandemic. While this included creating supports and resources for our teachers, we prioritized wrap-around services to students over the course of the year through various programs. Each of these programs were purposefully designed to impact one of the three key areas – education access, education quality, and student wellbeing. They included:

An expansion of our play-based early childhood education program, covering over 400 little learners aged 3 to 6.
Phone calls to families during COVID-19 closures, prioritizing vulnerable at-risk students to ensure their academic progress and wellbeing in their home.
An incredible early literacy program called Read Smart, with high-impact, externally validated results. Our pilot schools had just 5% of students below minimum levels of literacy, compared to 40% across the country.

We continued to collect and analyze internal data on enrollment, attendance, literacy & numeracy performance, and retention. Our framework also helps us track patterns across communities and schools over time to ensure that our interventions have meaningful impact.

89%

STUDENT ATTENDANCE RATE

60%

FEMALE student ENROLLMENT

5,240

STUDENTs ENROLLED

<2%

DROPOUT RATE

Impact Girls: Continuing our commitment to young women

Our Impact Girls programs continue to thrive, despite the pandemic. These wraparound services include:

Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) clubs at Upper Primary Schools, covering difficult topics such as women’s rights, consent, gender-based violence, peer pressure, HIV/AIDS, etc.
Menstrual Health Hygiene programs for both in-school and out-of-school women and girls. This program teaches young women to make their own reusable menstrual pads, and a small bag to store them in.
NetGirls Zambia, a rural netball league for young women, which restarted after COVID-19 in 2021!

We are happy to report that across almost all grades and subject areas, our female students perform similarly to our male students. Gender parity is a critical goal of Impact Girls, and we examine our data across this subgroup on a termly basis.

“We appreciate Impact Network for coming up with good projects that have greater impact in people’s lives especially in girls and women lives. These kind of projects solve more than one challenge women and girls face every day. The projects also help solve challenges families and communities face.”
– NetGirls Zambia Zone Manager, Christine

Impact Health: Expanding due to COVID-19 pandemic

Impact Health rose to the occasion during the pandemic, expanding programs to make over 40,000 masks for students, families and communities. In addition to this, we were able to host community workshops on child protection to almost 1,000 family members. These workshops are critical to our child protection efforts in the areas that we serve. Our Life Skills & Reproductive Health curriculum served 2,000 Upper Primary students, teaching skills to support students as they transition to adolescence. Critically, a multi-year survey completed in 2021 found that our child protection work had significantly improved student safety in our schools.

Impact Earth: Programs to combat climate change

Impact Earth was a part of our programs from the very start — we just didn’t name it! Each of our schools is powered by solar panels and sustainability has been a core value since Impact’s inception. In 2021, we formalized these programs under Impact Earth, and added a number of initiatives — including tree-planting, upcycling and student-centered environmental initiatives, rainwater harvesting, and eco-construction. We have planted over 8,250 trees to date, combatting deforestation in the areas where we work. We have also partnered with local NGOs in the agriculture space and look forward to growing this program.

2021 was the year we persevered and thrived!

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As 2021 brought us into the second year of the pandemic, our team’s resilience was in full force! While the core of our work is Impact Education, we continue to test innovative ways to improve the lives of our students and families.

We piloted the most impactful early literacy program we’ve ever tried! Our Read Smart visual phonics pilot had incredible results and was scaled up to 8 schools in 2022.

We expanded our Early Childhood Education program to 16 classes across 8 schools! We now serve over 400 students in a play-based program steeped in exploration and creativity.

During school closures in June and July, we piloted a phone call outreach program to reach families and students who were most vulnerable. Our School Support Officers reached almost 600 students!

We grew our Child Protection programs as a response to our internal survey data. The team is now led by two School Support Managers who are skilled at overseeing child protection cases and preventative programs in their region.

We launched Impact Earth to respond to the growing climate change crisis and to impart the importance of protecting our world to our students.

At Impact Network, we are always piloting and tweaking new programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this was no different. We remain steadfast in our mission - to ensure every student has access to a quality education!

Reshma Patel
Executive Director