91Â鶹¹ú²ú¾«Æ·×ÔÅÄ been mobilizing support to incorporate sustainability across the national curriculum, teacher training and learning environments. This includes reorienting and adjusting the curricula, and identifying gaps and opportunities in teacher capacity, pedagogy, and assessment.
Strengthening sustainability in the national curriculum
Through the Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative (CSESI), UNESCO and Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education are working with partners, including UNESCO’s Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), to implement two new global standards developed by UNESCO and the Greening Education Partnership: the Green school quality standard and the Greening curriculum guidance.
As part this initiative, Zimbabwe has strengthened greening aspects in its new curriculum framework, entitled the Heritage Based Curriculum (2024-2030). This includes ensuring that climate topics are taught in a way that is age-appropriate and developmentally suitable, with a coherent progression from primary to secondary levels.
It also means identifying the specific competencies related to climate change education for sustainable development, and disaster risk reduction (DRR) that are expected at each education level and ensuring that the assessment methods are aligned with the new content and learning objectives.
So far, with support of UNESCO, and based on an inclusive approach and social dialogue, Zimbabwe’s Ministry has updated the content from pre-primary to upper junior level of over 100 curriculum documents. A pilot phase of newly developed learning materials is scheduled for early 2025, with plans to expand the program nationwide.
Greening teacher education
Teachers need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to deliver the updated, climate-friendly curriculum. 91Â鶹¹ú²ú¾«Æ·×ÔÅÄ been leading the review of pre-service teacher education curricula, benchmarking them against the new .
Together, UNESCO and Zimbabwe identified steps to incorporate climate change and sustainability into pedagogy, content, and assessment practices. Zimbabwe’s teacher education institutions have the autonomy to frequently revise their curricula, and this agility is helping equip future educators with the skills to embed climate change education into classrooms. The country is aiming to monitor changes in teaching practice and to provide concrete feedback to teachers as to how they are integrating sustainability into their classrooms.
Aligning schools to the Green school quality standards
In addition to the work on curriculum, the CSESI initiative is helping the country to align its schools to the new international Green school quality standard.
The standard will be integrated into the school inspection tools along four key areas: school governance, facilities and operation, teaching and learning, and community engagement.
As a next step, the inspection criteria will be defined as part of the greening process, and the Green school quality standards will be disseminated to the schools. A partner organization will work with the schools to raise awareness and train the schools on a roll-out basis in 2025.
The Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative (CSESI) is funded by the Global Partnership in Education. Launched in 2023, the initiative seeks to enhance countries' capacities to mainstream climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability into education sector plans, budgets and strategies. The initiative has begun with support to Cambodia, Malawi, South Sudan and Zimbabwe, and plans to expand activities up to 35 of the most climate-vulnerable countries between 2024 and 2026.
