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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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?
Read More
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:
Read More
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.
Read More
This week, we celebrated what would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday.
Read More
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
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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!
Read More
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,
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
GLOW is a stand-alone club for girls and women in communities; it stands for Girls Leading Our World. It is a self-led group that explores economic, social and cultural rights of girls and women to improve the understanding on Gender Empowerment and Equality and to increase the capacity to learn Problem Solving and Decision Making.
Read More
It has been a difficult year. I’ve been reflecting on the people I am so thankful for – everyone from front-line health workers to grocery store staff to the delivery folks in NYC that have helped this city survive during the pandemic.
Read More
I recently learned of a Hindu film profiling Shakuntala Devi – an Indian writer and mathematician, popularly known as “the human computer” . She was considered a gifted child, and her math skills eventually gave her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The math problem that got her there? She demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779) in her head in just 28 seconds.
Read More