The United Nations hosted the Transforming Education Summit this weekend, which included a presentation from UNICEF and Microsoft about their collaborative project Learning Passport and how it extends digitized education into new corners of the world, vowing a digital future for every child. The presentation included reports from government officials of Zimbabwe, Laos, and Mexico.

Digitized education tools have been tried in other regions before. New Globe was founded in 2007, venturing on a journey from proof-of-concept community school programmes in order to participate in national multi-partner public-private partnerships, operating as technical service delivery partners to statewide programs at scale and eventually supporting national government modification programs. Their for-profit model for taking on a nation’s education system has been fulfilled with mixed results. They have had limited success in Kenya, met with a dispute in Liberia, and were rejected in Uganda.

Learning Passport is more enterprising. Only a few years old, but it is now in 26 countries with 56 languages illustrated. UNICEF, the presenters said, saw a growing education crisis observed by low literacy rates and aggravated by displaced refugee children and the shuttering of schools during the pandemic. In other words, students whose education had been dramatically disrupted.

Microsoft has always had an enthusiastic interest in the education market. And so the two teamed up to build a program that could deliver digitized education materials for a wide variety of contexts, including communities with undersized or no reliable internet.

There are some clear advantages to a program that can observe students wherever they may be. An audience member followed that among the millions of Ukrainian refugees in Poland are hundreds of thousands of students who are now in Polish schools, competent to continue their education in their language thanks in part to Learning Passport.

The presentation also displayed a video of Myanmar refugees in a school in Bangladesh, learning in their native tongue. And all three government officials praised the program’s effectiveness for teacher training, which helps build capacity.