Reflections on ALiVE’s Collaborative Endeavour

AliVE’s visible achievement has been to develop contextualised assessment tools for three life skills and one value, undertake a large-scale assessment program at household level across three countries, and engage with hundreds of stakeholders in the process. What is less visible is how this has been achieved, who is responsible for it, and what the motivating force behind it has been. This chapter describes reflections on the collaborative processes that underlie these activities. In so doing, the chapter locates that collaboration within the history of community and civil society contributions to education in East Africa, and more specifically within Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The chapter’s reflections make explicit who the contributors were and how they were able to work together. In these reflections two factors are of particular interest. The first concerns the link between the way individuals and organisations worked together, and the actual life skills that were the object of their attention, in particular the skill of collaboration. The second is the constituting of the endeavour as a learning journey. The process is seen not merely as a production of an assessment tool and consequent results which can be used to advocate for life skills in education, but as a vehicle for equipping collaborators with the technical and work skills that they can take forward into future education spaces.