The iBali (story) Network: Democratising knowledge through creative storytelling with youth who are excluded from learning in urban African Schools

In a recent forum on reinvigorating arts and humanities in Africa, the African Humanities Programme (AHP) highlighted the important contribution they can make to defining African approaches to building scholarship and meeting social challenges. The social challenge the iBali Network is focussed on is the complex combination of factors which exclude young people from learning in urban schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Secondary school education underpins global development strategies, and is seen as a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills required to secure decent livelihoods in a globalised world. Enrollment in secondary education has increased nine-fold since the 1970s, but youth in urban areas face under-resourced and overcrowded classrooms, unstable home-environments, crime and gendered social pressures, forced employment, poor sanitation and health challenges. It is young people who have opportunities for schooling, but who are excluded from opportunities for learning, who are at the centre of the iBali Network. Learning exclusions are compounded by the little attention given in African public schools to young people's articulation of their perspectives and experiences of the world they inhabit and the world they want.

We propose to create a network of expert and early career researchers (ECRs) and practitioners whose work coalesces around using participatory storytelling to tackle social issues, working at the intersection of GCRF challenges 3 (inclusive and equitable quality education), 8 (sustainable cities and communities) and 11 (poverty, inequality and gender). Storytelling approaches integrate international, scholarly and indigenous narratives and help surface and give value to different forms of knowledge. Through a focus on in-school youth and storytelling, the iBali Network is committed to both the promotion of arts approaches to address development challenges and the democratisation of knowledge about development through the arts.

The AHP also highlighted under-funding of arts and humanities departments in Africa, and the limited opportunities scholars working across the arts/development boundary have for networking, collaboration and dialogue. We know from our own experience that creating a critical mass of scholars working across this boundary is compounded by the research methods training available for ECRs working on critical social issues. This sits firmly outside the arts, and predominant methodological approaches can be problematic in how they frame and investigate exclusions from learning. The iBali Network responds directly to these concerns.

Through a range of activities which include a methodology-sharing summer school in South Africa, a bidding for funding workshop in Kenya, and sustained support for ECRs from across Africa, iBali aims to mobilise academics using participatory storytelling approaches. The network will demonstrate the approaches by working with academics, practitioners, and teachers and learners themselves to challenge the ways in which youth are excluded from learning in urban education systems. The core team is made up of internationally renowned scholars from Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, Sweden and South Africa. The Advisory Group extends the geographical reach to Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Sierra Leone. Further, through the recruitment of ECRs, the iBali Network, the methodologies it promotes, and the resulting impact, will be authentically pan-African.

Fresh attention and more creative work is required to better understand why youth don't learn in urban schools. Through iBali's focus on storytelling, the arts become a mode of knowledge generation as well as a form of expression and engagement. The intention is to create the starting conditions for a sustainable and scalable network through which exclusions can be surfaced, highlighted and addressed by scholars, activists, policy makers, teachers and the youth of Africa themselves.

This applied arts and humanities project will create an African-based network of scholars working at the arts/education/development interface, in order to address the important social issue of the exclusion of African youth from learning. The network aims to bring together experienced and early career scholars along with NGOs and members of existing networks to share experience, skills, methodologies and materials to build capacity for the application of arts based story-telling approaches to development issues in Africa. Within the initial funded phases of the network, and the planned ongoing activities, it will produce both direct and indirect impact on different stakeholders as follows:

Direct impact

* Direct engagement with youth and schools in Cape Town during the initial summer school phase through live workshops that employ techniques drawn from Theatre for Development and from first-person storytelling through digital arts.

* Opportunities for early career researchers to develop their skills and capacities to apply arts-based approaches to development issues such as improving education.

* Integration and improved co-ordination between existing networks and communities of practice comprising scholars and practitioners whose work coalesces around youth, the arts and education in Africa.

Indirect impact

* African policy makers, teachers and teacher educators will access improved knowledge on the application of arts and humanities approaches to improve learning in schools, as well as new open access teaching resources.

* Over time, we expect to produce media which will increase an appreciation of opportunities to improve the work of urban schools and teachers amongst policy actors and the public.

* Future student teachers, future learners and African publics will benefit from better learning in urban schools, leading to enhanced long term social and economic outcomes.

Finally, a wider impact will be achieved through targeted, strategic communication through events and through web and social media communication using well designed and attractive outputs to underpin the credibility and reach of the findings. In Africa direct contact with network members will be supplemented by work with policy stakeholders, as well as direct interaction with various publics through local and social media and public events such as film showings. At the international level, the centre of the communications strategy will be a blog-driven website which will feature open-access methodological resources around participatory storytelling to address development / social issues, in multiple languages to ensure pan-African impact.