Learning Ecosystems for Human Flourishing


Education systems in many parts of the Global South face systemic barriers—conflict, poverty, displacement, and structural inequality—that conventional, centrally designed models struggle to address. In these contexts, learning ecosystems are emerging as a transformative alternative: community-led networks that integrate formal and non-formal education to promote equity, resilience, and learner agency.

This project investigates ten pioneering learning ecosystems across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, each operating in its own unique sociocultural and political environment. Our methodological approach combines qualitative inquiry, network analysis, and participatory research design to understand how these ecosystems enable human flourishing in adversity.

We begin with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ecosystem leaders and key actors, generating rich narrative accounts of local challenges, governance models, and innovation strategies. These narratives are then synthesised through collaborative sensemaking workshops, where ecosystem representatives co-analyse findings, identify shared patterns, and surface distinctive practices.

To extend the analysis, we apply network mapping to capture relationships within and across ecosystems, visualising flows of knowledge, resources, and collaboration. This is supported by the creation of an open knowledge repository—a curated dataset of cases, practices, and tools—designed for use by both practitioners and researchers.

Our analytic framework is explicitly co-designed with local stakeholders, ensuring that categories of success, resilience, and equity reflect community priorities rather than external benchmarks. Insights from this iterative process inform the development of a context-specific framework for scalable education models, designed to be adaptable across geographies while anchored in local realities.

By integrating field-based qualitative evidence with systems-level analysis, this work strengthens the collective capacity of learning ecosystems to address multi-layered barriers to education, influence policy through evidence generated with and for communities, and embed human flourishing at the heart of education systems.

A report summarizing this project can be found here:

New paper on research field evolution

In this paper, we explore how we can quantify the rise and fall patterns of scientific fields. In particular we find that the early stage of a field is characterised by small interdisciplinary teams of early career researchers publishing disruptive work, while late phases exhibit the role of specialised, large teams building on the previous works in the field. Summary in the thread below:

New paper in EPJ Data Science

In this paper, we explore the propagation of perturbations in large-scale engineering projects. Check out the thread below for more information! The paper can be found here.

Funding from ANR JCJC

We are happy to share that we obtained a French National funding ANR “JCJC” (Young researcher): “CORES: Quantitative assessment of open collaborations in science and engineering”. This project will run in the next two years. The abstract can be found below:

Understanding how team collaborations underlie team performance is key for the design of organizational strategies as well as the development of new technologies for making groups more effective and collective actions more scalable. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the challenge of coordinating large-scale, self-organized, open collaborative initiatives to provide an advanced collective response to the emergency. Here, we propose to leverage large-scale, fine-grain datasets of open science and open-source ecosystems for measuring and modeling how intra- and inter-team open collaborative processes underlie collective performance and learning in science and engineering. We expect these results can contribute to improving the efficiency and proficiency of innovation and impact in multi-scale organizational systems including both private and public sectors.

Excellent Thesis Award

We are glad to announce that our Master’s student intern Stephanie Chuah Shin Ju from last summer was awarded the ‘Excellent Thesis Award’ by the Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management for her thesis “The Online Transition of the Geneva-Tsinghua Initiative SDG Summer School“. She is also in the running for the university-wide prize, which they will announce in June 2021.