Almost a decade ago, I met with the District Education Board Secretary (DEBS) in Katete at the time, Mr. Fully Tembo. I was new to the position, and the goal of the meeting was to come to an agreement about the operation of Impact Network’s schools in Katete District. While we had been working with Mr. Tembo for a while, it was the first formal agreement we were working towards. In that meeting, we shared Impact Network’s mission and goals, while also learning much more about the government’s priorities.

Over the years, the DEBS changed a few times over, and so did our partnership. Last year, newly elected President Hakainde Hichilema made good on his campaign promises to provide a free public education across primary and secondary schools. Part of that initiative was to hire 30,000 new teachers – more than the last decade combined. It was a Herculean effort, requiring the coordination of hundreds of civil servants and elected officials to help process over 100,000 applications, assess their quality, assign them to provinces and districts, and allocate them to the schools which needed them most. Complexities aside, this investment was also a remarkable solution to the question: If a government wants to invest in education, what is the best way to do that? The surprising answer, in an era where many favor innovation and novelty, was simply: Teachers.

For Impact Network, this presented a unique opportunity that we haven’t seen in our time working in Zambia. After the announcement, we sprung into action, working to strengthen our relationship at the national, provincial, and district level. We held engagement meetings, and heard from the government on the ways in which they would like our support in meeting their goals. We conducted school monitoring visits with Standards Officers in the districts that we work, to understand our shared values around school success. We held workshops with Head Teachers across all of the schools that we work in to share with them how Impact Network could work to support new teachers.

Across all of these meetings, we also heard from ministry staff on feedback that they had for us in developing a new Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Education in Zambia. That MoU was signed this week by the Permanent Secretary, Mr. Joel Kamoko, and I’m so proud to announce that this agreement will see government teachers implementing our proven eSchool 360 education model. It is one of the first of its kind in Zambian primary education, and we hope this partnership will improve our sustainability efforts and opportunities to scale.

For this achievement – I would like to thank our leadership team in Zambia who played such a critical role in building these relationships and securing this partnership. This included (in no particular order!), Promise Makala, Lweendo Maanya, Steven Chirwa, Karly Southworth, Annabelle Hardy, former staff members Samuel Shawa and Sakalani Phiri, and our consultant, Stuart Ngoni Nsana. While the MoU is just one document, it required hundreds of hours of creative thinking, problem-solving, and a good sense of humor (!) to come to this point in our partnership. To them, I owe my deepest gratitude for making this dream a reality and an incredible accomplishment. Zikomo Kwambiri!

-Reshma