2022 ANNUAL REPORT

Learning to Thrive

This year was a year of partnerships for Impact Network, and an incredible turning point for Impact Network’s journey to improve academic outcomes for all Zambian students. We started 2022 with 5,500 children from ECE to grade 7 returning to school for a complete academic year. We held our annual teacher conference, had our whole team together in Zambia, and celebrated successes and milestones as a team. We also strengthened our work with the Ministry of Education in Zambia and embarked on a partnership that will see government teachers implementing our proven eSchool 360 education model.

2022 was the year we reached out and partnered up. We are filled with gratitude to each of you who supported us on the journey.

Impact Education: Strengthening the eSchool 360

We continue to adapt and improve our eSchool 360 model as the education landscape shifts in Zambia. 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. They included:

• An expansion of our innovative Read Smart Cinyanja early literacy program, with sustained, externally validated research results. After two years in the program, just 3% of students are below minimum literacy standards, compared to 31% for the rest of the country.

• A new Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Education in Zambia, creating space for government teachers to implement our proven eSchool 360 education model.

• The first of our Parent Engagement Days since the pandemic – with over 1,600 parents participating in eLearning lessons, hands-on activities, and student performances.

Each of these programs were purposefully designed to impact one of the three key areas – education access, education quality, and student wellbeing.

Impact Girls: Continuing our commitment to young women

Impact Girls programs continue to thrive and grow as we learn more about what works to keep girls in school. Across almost all grades and subject areas, our female students perform similarly to our male students. Additionally, in 2022:

• Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) clubs continued at Upper Primary Schools, covering difficult topics such as HIV/AIDS, puberty, peer pressure, negotiation and refusal skills, healthy relationships, gender-based violence and consent, and women’s rights. The program reached almost 400 girls in 2022 alone.

• Menstrual Health Hygiene programs were held for upper primary girls. This program teaches young women to make their own reusable menstrual pads, and a small bag to store them in. Our students made over 1,000 pads last year!

• NetGirls Zambia, a rural netball league for young women, had its highest participation yet with 1,200 players across 80 teams.

We are happy to report that across almost all grades and subject areas, our female students perform similarly to our male students.

“I am so happy working for Impact Network because it has continued giving me so much opportunities to interact with young women and girls in many activities like the menstrual pad project, tree planting and the netball league. Helping young women and girls is something I enjoy doing and it is my passion. I like using my time and opportunities that I am given in the community to advise young women, especially girls, to never take opportunities for granted in life. One piece of advice I like giving to girls who are still schooling is to always let school come first in everything that they do. I enjoy spending time and advising the young women and girls because I feel they could learn from me and my experience as I mostly use my experiences as examples.

– NetGirls Zambia Zone Manager, Edith Phiri

Impact Health: Strengthening our student wellbeing

In a post-COVID-19 world, Zambia still faced health challenges such as cholera and malaria. We continued to strengthen our Life Skills & Reproductive Health curriculum for students as they transition to adolescence. We held community workshops for 500 parents to help instill child protection committees in each community where we work. Last, we created systems to better support teenage pregnancies by developing more formal maternity leave policies and implementing programs to reduce the stigma around pregnancy for girls continuing in school.

Impact Earth: Programs to combat climate change

Our Impact Earth initiatives include solar power, rainwater harvesting, tree-planting, and educational upcycling to rethink the use of trash in our school environment. We have planted over 15,000 trees to-date, combatting deforestation in the areas where we work. We implemented upcycling and student-centered environmental initiatives, including a Go Green Day, culminating in projects that students make out of “trash”. Last, we laid the groundwork to work with Earth Warriors to provide comprehensive climate change curriculum to all of our students in Grades 1 through 4.

2022 was the year we partnered up!

This year was a year of partnerships for Impact Network, and an incredible turning point for Impact Network’s journey to improve academic outcomes for all Zambian students. After the election of a new President, Hakainde Hichilema, Zambia’s new dawn administration has made significant strides towards this mission by introducing free secondary education, recruiting 30,000 new teachers, and enacting the Children’s Code Act to advance children’s rights and wellbeing.

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 scaled our Read Smart phonics program to eight schools, continued our work focused on girls education, increased our community outreach, and bolstered our environmental work.

Our graduating seventh graders had the highest scores we have ever recorded — 86% of them passed their examinations to proceed to secondary school, compared to a pass rate of 55% in the district.

Impact Network also received recognition for our work around literacy in particular, including being a 2022 Library of Congress Literacy Awards Honoree and making the HundrED inspiring innovation list.

At Impact Network, we are always piloting and tweaking new programs. But, we remain steadfast in our mission - to ensure every student has access to a quality education!