NBA

Neil Butcher & Associates (NBA) is a private organization based in South Africa that manages projects, conducts research, and provides advisory support services in the field of education in the developing world. NBA’s mission is to contribute to improving education in developing-world contexts by advancing open, sustainable, and cost-effective solutions to educational challenges. With this grant, NBA will develop a paper on “openness in education in the 21st century” and research reports on alternative approaches to change management in large-scale education systems. Through this work, NBA will develop, test, and document granular, reflective, and monitoring strategies that facilitate shifts toward meaningful, sustained openness in education systems. (Substrategy: Field Building)

Neil Butcher and Associates, a consulting firm with OER expertise, will conduct research to determine whether and how open licenses could help increase the amount of reading material available to children across the developing world. The results are expected to inform policy solutions to high rates of illiteracy among young children and, more specifically, help shape the Global Book Alliance, a consortium being established by international donors. This work is intended to advance the Education Program’s strategy of encouraging policies in the developing world that promote the use of OER to solve key problems in education.