The English in Action teaching material is in great demand at local level. Kishoreganj sadar upazila is one real example of this. In the upazila there are 141 primary schools, and 39 are covered by EIA.  About a year ago, the Upazila Education Officer (UEO) for Kishoregonj had a request from a Head Teacher from one of the non-EIA schools. That Head Teacher had found out about the EIA audio and video materials and was sure they would be very effective, and so he asked the UEO if he could also get hold of the materials and introduce them into his school. The UEO thought about the proposal and the importance of improving the English language skill around the whole upazila.

The UEO suggested to the Head Teachers to come up with plan how they can possibly use EIA approaches in non-EIA schools. Through discussions Head teachers suggested that they could provide speakers for their schools from their own funds.

The Head Teachers checked their budgets and found that some money from the SLIP (School Level Improvement) fund could be used for buying the speakers, as the fund is for the development of students. So they went ahead and bought the speakers themselves, and through the UEO they made a request to EIA for the SD cards, preloaded with EIA materials. However, from EIA’s point of view, delivering the SD cards without any orientation would not be very effective. So, since this was going to be  a different, slimmer model for delivering the project (no  formal teacher facilitators, only one day of initial training, locally managed ICT materials and monitoring), a small team from EIA worked on slight revisions of the materials, the training support  and the monitoring elements of EIA to make them suitable for these new conditions. 
 

The EIA team was present at the two sets of locally managed workshops, first in February and then in June, 2014. In these two sets of workshops, 204 assistant teachers, 102 Head Teachers and 6 AUEO’s, along with the UEO, received  orientation to EIA approaches, as well as their role of monitoring. This new type of intervention in Kishoregonj is equally important not only for that particular area but also for EIA,  as the experience of this locally managed model can show a path in the near future as EIA moves into the Institutionalization and Sustainability phase.