Event Highlights: NORRAG Regional Webinar: Mapping Regional Education Policy Challenges

This interregional webinar on durable education policy challenges across borders, speakers from Brazil, Turkiye and Uganda convened to share insights from their respective contexts and engage with the audience in an interactive Q&A. The session also showcased our Social Systems Map available to all members of the NORRAG Network, as a tool for fostering collaboration with our global network. After a general introduction of NORRAG and its core mission set, the speakers presented their work in turn.

Burcu Meltem Arık (Education Reform Initiative, Sabancı University, Türkiye)

Burcu opened by previewing the Education Reform Initiative’s annual research publication ahead of its official release later that week, which offers a systematic review of Turkiye’s education sector. Despite its scale and decades of reform efforts, the system remains marked by deep regional inequalities, demographic pressures and overlapping economic, ecological and social pressures. Access to education, disengagement and absenteeism form serious concerns, alongside shifting labor market demands which have devalued higher education degrees as well as TVET graduate labor. Policies to advocate for include universal access to at least one daily school meal and making age five part of compulsory education to reduce early inequalities. She called for stronger, more consistent support for teachers, alongside a rights-based and pluralistic education system that protects diversity, noting that the education landscape is defined by both entrenched inequities and emerging opportunities for a more just and inclusive policy direction.

Susan Opok Tamusime (Federation of African Womam Educationalists, Uganda)

Susan Opok’s presentation introduced FAWE’s work to promote girls and women’s schooling, using Uganda and its challenges as a case study. Despite significant progress, about half of Ugandan adolescents are enrolled in secondary education. Gender-responsive policies and guidelines are being implemented, complemented by civil society organisations which provide material and informational support to the population. FAWE offers models which are essential to system-strengthening, deployed with the intent to institutionalize gender-responsive education. Examples include Gender Responsive Pedagogy, which trains educators to build safer classroom environments, and the REAL (responsible, engaged and loving) Fathers initiative which mentors first-time fathers, recognizing the key role that the household and men play in creating supportive learning environments. Implementation of this work remains challenging, however, given the instability of funding, weak infrastructure, and capacity gaps between policy and practice. Inclusive and safe schooling requires coordinated efforts across sectors, marked by long-term partnerships and sustained resourcing.

Israel Coelho (CLADE – Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education)

Israel’s presentation is situated in the context of rising pressure on public education across Latin America, where far-right political movements promote privatisation and shrinking public investment. In parallel, children and adolescents receive schooling amid rapid digitalisation and overlapping climate and environmental risks. As digital rights are insufficiently guarded by national governments, CLADE builds alliances between academia and digital rights organisations to provide knowledge about how digitalisation intersects with gender, privatisation and pedagogy. Digital divides can exacerbate these pre-existing issues, as exposure and circulation speed mounts. As often private service providers, big tech companies can play a pivotal role in moderating these pressures and increasingly position themselves as decisionmakers in these domains. This raises concerns about accountability, power and the coloniality of digital agency. Additionally, the material value chain that produces digital outcomes, from mines to datacentres, harm those living in environmentally precarious regions like Central and Latin America. CLADE works to ensure that students and teachers become critical users and producers of technology rather than passive consumers. Israel cautioned that technologies which do not help build critical citizenship or support the right to education should be carefully questioned and limited to avoid digital rights infringement and data exploitation. He closed by calling for ongoing alliance-building, reiterating the importance of (digital) rights-based approaches and a fundamental consideration of education as a tool for equality.