Introduction

The Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures (TESF) network was funded by the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and involved partners from India, Rwanda, Somalia/ Somaliland, South Africa, the Netherlands and the UK. The network was initiated in 2019 and officially ended as a funded initiative in 2023. The purpose of TESF was to provide better understanding of how education can be transformed to support sustainable livelihoods, sustainable cities and communities and climate action. Aligned with these concerns in the contexts of India, Rwanda, Somalia/Somaliland, and South Africa, a focus of the network was to tackle intersecting inequalities including those based on gender, socio-economic status, race, class, languages, coloniality, and Indigeneity. Overall, the network funded 67 projects across the four countries of research focus.

Underpinning TESF’s approach was a methodological commitment to knowledge co-creation. The purpose of this sourcebook is to provide a critical overview of what we have learned as a network from our experiences of applying knowledge co-creation as a transformative practice in economically constrained and highly unequal contexts. Researchers within the network sought to synthesise emerging findings and to generate learning from across the funded projects and diversity of global South contexts, shared in this document. It is in the spirit of sharing these learnings that we frame this as a ‘methodological sourcebook’ rather than as a more conventional report.