Funding to ACCESS Prematurely Terminated

Jan 15, 2023

Written by Dr. Ritesh Shah, Principal Investigator, ACCESS

In October 2022, Dubai Cares notified the University of Auckland that it had to suspend its support to ACCESS. Due to the war in Ukraine, inflationary pressures and COVID-19, it had been unable to raise sufficient funding for its research programmes including the Evidence for Education in Emergencies (E-Cubed) programme. This decision has affected several current E-Cubed projects alongside ACCESS.

One cartoon fox stands in front of a desk with a computer monitor on it. Three cartoon foxes pop out through the monitor to give the first fox a hug

We were surprised and disappointed by this news. Dubai Cares asked us to wrap up activities as quickly as possible, and all outstanding and planned activity for ACCESS under Phase 2 were finalised by the end of December 2022.

At this point, work continues in all three countries to progress the key priorities and actions identified in the action plans of the national task teams, with the support of the AEWG. This signals a high level of ownership and engagement for the ambitions of ACCESS by education stakeholders in country, alongside the members who are part of the AEWG.

Without funding, however, the scale and scope of what national task teams in Jordan, Nigeria and Colombia can do is significantly constrained. Additionally, the University of Auckland does not have capacity to support ongoing research needs identified by the national task teams and the AEWG.

If you are interested to support ACCESS, please reach out in first instance to Becky Calder (b.calder@auckland.ac.nz) Development Manager at the University of Auckland, or accelerated.education@inee.org.