Archives
September 2020
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / October 15, 2020
September is typically a back-to-school month here in the U.S., but this year school looks a lot different. With many children going back to school online, it’s not surprising that this month we’ve seen a lot written about education technology. First, a new study from Brookings on “Realizing the Promise” of education technology to improve […]
Read MoreAugust 2020
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / September 10, 2020
Our last post was a bit gloomy, so we’re dedicating this month’s Puggle to discussing solutions that might help the education sector to come out of this crisis stronger. We’re moved by the way Arundhati Roy describes this opportunity: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This […]
Read MoreJuly 2020
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / August 3, 2020
What does COVID-19 mean for education and girls’ education in particular? We discuss four themes: (1) Education is in crisis. In fact, it faces more than one crisis. (2) The crisis is especially bad for girls. (3) The pessimistic view is that it will take a long time to recover and inequality will be starker for many years to come. (4) The optimistic view is that we’ll “build back better.”
Read MoreFebruary 2020
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / March 4, 2020
February is the month of love. At least that’s what a whole bunch of retail marketers want us to believe. We don’t have anything to sell, but we are orienting this month’s Puggle around the theme of love…as it relates to girls’ education. The case for teaching love — or at least teaching socioemotional learning […]
Read MoreJanuary 2020
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / February 12, 2020
Happy 2020! To kick off the year, we’re excited to share a recent episode of the Do One Better Podcast, in which host Alberto Lidji interviews Echidna Giving founders Craig Silverstein and Mary Obelnicki. Listen to the impetus behind founding Echidna Giving — including Craig’s theory of change, which, broadly characterized, “starts with girls’ education […]
Read MoreOur Grantees Spoke and Here’s What We Learned
Dana Schmidt / Insights / January 24, 2020
At the end of 2019 we asked Echidna Giving grantees for feedback on how we are doing. In the spirit of transparency, we would like to share what we learned and summarize how we plan to move forward.
Read MoreDecember 2019
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / December 18, 2019
It’s hard to believe it, but the futuristic-sounding year of 2020 is just two weeks away! Before we race into the future, our last Puggle of 2019 provides an opportunity to reflect on three lessons from the past year. These are drawn from work our grantees are doing to: (1) promote gender equality in early […]
Read MoreOctober 2019
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / November 18, 2019
In this October Puggle, we’re excited to share three newsworthy items from the world of Echidna Giving grantees that we think are significant for the broader field of girls’ education. First, the development community celebrated as three of its own—Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer—won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their […]
Read MoreSeptember 2019
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / October 9, 2019
News from Aug and Sept on everything from why girls’ education doesn’t lead to better labor market outcomes to the tension between getting school systems to teach basic skills vs. getting them to teach the broader range of skills we know are important and whether the education aid architecture is broken.
Read MoreJuly 2019
Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / July 31, 2019
July was a hot month—literally, with record-breaking heat in many parts of the globe, and figuratively, in girls’ education. The G7 and UNESCO hosted the Paris International Conference on Innovating for girls’ and women’s empowerment through education, where UNESCO launched an Atlas of Girls’ and Women’s Right to Education and France Calls on G-7 to […]
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