Jacobs Foundation partners with What Works Hub for Global Education; joins international consortium to improve foundational learning for millions of children

31 July 2024, Zürich and Oxford: The Jacobs Foundation has joined the What Works Hub for Global Education as a ‘Strategic Partner’ to embed grounded evidence and field research in government strategies to successfully deliver education reforms globally.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Jacobs Foundation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) will see the two organizations work together to improve foundational learning for girls and boys through the What Works Hub for Global Education Programme. Both organizations are committed to supporting policymakers’ use of local data and global evidence to influence education reforms in their respective education systems. This proactive approach – which includes the provision of strong technical solutions – will help to generate improvements in education outcomes for millions of children. Additionally, the partnership aims to strengthen local evidence education ecosystems, including Education Evidence Labs (EdLabs), which is fundamental to long-lasting, sustainable change.

The What Works Hub for Global Education is an international partnership supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and housed at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Its mission is to increase literacy, numeracy, and other key skills in low- and middle-income countries. Its work will be undertaken in four primary countries to begin with, namely India, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Tanzania. Other countries where further work will be conducted will include Bangladesh, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.

The consortium brings together a unique mix of world-leading academics, civil society organizations, philanthropies, foundations, and government agencies from low-, middle-, and high-income countries to achieve better learning outcomes across the world. Its multi-year collaborative research initiative will see partners generate research evidence about the effective implementation of education reforms, and support governments in real time to make bold changes to their education systems. These collective efforts will directly affect up to 3 million children and reach a further 17 million through the consortium’s global influence.

The Jacobs Foundation joins a community of mission-driven organizations, including other ‘Strategic Partners’ such as the British Council, USAID, the World Bank, and other internationally recognized bodies committed to the effective implementation of education reform.

Donika Dimovska, Chief Knowledge Officer for the Jacobs Foundation, said, “Joining this community illustrates our determination to work with all actors equally committed to better education outcomes. We believe that evidence should sit at the heart of policy and practice, and we share this vision with many others in the What Works Hub for Global Education community. Foundations act as the backbone for supporting governments to foster innovation in education. Through this partnership, we will continue to inspire others on how science can inform policy and practice, leading to better learning environments and ultimately better outcomes for all children.”

Noam Angrist, Academic Director for the What Works Hub for Global Education, commenting on the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, said, “I am thrilled the Jacobs Foundation has joined the What Works Hub for Global Education as a Strategic Partner. The Jacobs Foundation has a long track record of generating rigorous evidence as well as supporting direct application and use of evidence by governments and implementing organizations. Connecting the dots among researchers, policymakers, and implementers is at the heart of the What Works Hub for Global Education's vision to ensure more frequent and effective real-world implementation of scientific evidence as well as to catalyse a science of implementation."

Charlotte Watts, Chief Scientific Adviser for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said, “We are excited that the Jacobs Foundation is formally joining the What Works Hub for Global Education as a strategic partner. We share a common commitment to support governments in transforming children’s learning based on research and evidence. Working in partnership and bringing together our collective expertise, we will improve quality education for children globally.”

With its 30+ years of driving cross-cultural knowledge exchange in early childhood development, the Jacobs Foundation will contribute evidence-based research and insight to the consortium, drawing on its expertise as a partner to public, private, and third-sector actors across Europe, Africa, and South America.

Earlier this year, the Jacobs Foundation launched CEPE (Colombia Evidencia Potencial en Educación), a new multi-stakeholder initiative to strengthen learning networks and improve the uptake of evidence in education policymaking across Colombia. CEPE is the Foundation’s first program in South America, demonstrating its commitment to strengthening evidence-based learning in low- and middle-income education systems globally.

CEPE follows in the footsteps of the Foundation’s internationally recognized work in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Switzerland, where the creation of EdLabs continues to inform government policymaking, understand the variances between children’s learning behaviors, and understand the effective implementation of evidence-based practices at national and regional levels.

For further information on the Jacobs Foundation’s programs and initiatives, please visit www.jacobsfoundation.org. For updates on the What Works Hub for Global Education and further information on its upcoming Annual Conference in Oxford, UK this September, please visit www.wwhge.org.

About the organizations
About Jacobs Foundation:
Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, the Jacobs Foundation invests in the future of young people by enabling and promoting high-quality research into learning and development. Its vision is a world in which every child is given the evidence-based learning opportunities they need to thrive. To do this, the Foundation is executing its Strategy 2030 plan to translate evidence into policy and practice—underpinned by an ambitious Research Agenda to identify the variances between how children live and learn in different environments. Across several portfolios, the Jacobs Foundation works with public, private, and civil society partners in Switzerland, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Colombia. The Foundation also funds researchers globally, encouraging networking and partnerships to help inform evidence-based policy and practice worldwide.

About the What Works Hub for Global Education:

The What Works Hub for Global Education is an international partnership working out how to implement education reforms at scale, with the goal of increasing literacy, numeracy and other key skills in low- and middle-income countries.

Governments want to know how to get all children learning. Finding out what works through controlled studies has been a critical first step. Figuring out how to put these evidence-based ideas into widespread practice, all the way into millions of individual classrooms, is the next frontier.

The What Works Hub for Global Education aims to take this next, crucial step towards all children learning. It is a multi-year collaborative research initiative between the Blavatnik School of Government, the FCDO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, USAID, UNICEF, UNESCO-IIEP, the Learning Generation Initiative, the British Council and the Jacobs Foundation.

The Blavatnik School is convening a consortium of more than 40 partners that will generate evidence about effective implementation of education reforms, by working alongside governments undertaking such reforms in low- and middle-income countries. In an unprecedented example of undertaking research and reform simultaneously, this consortium will study how to implement education reforms at scale, while supporting governments in real time to do it.

About the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO):

The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) leads the UK’s work to end extreme poverty and tackle global challenges with international partners. We have a commitment to harness research to ensure the most cost-effective development impact and to ensure opportunities for all.

Education is a top priority for the UK as an essential right for children to secure the knowledge and skills they need to reach their potential. In addition to working with partner governments on strengthening education systems to deliver learning for all, the FCDO is committed to producing cutting education research and evidence on ‘what works’ and fostering global research and development partnerships to improve learning outcomes.

The FCDO developed the What Works Hub for Global Education as a partnership initiative to both deliver and enable better access to world class education research in support of governments committed to addressing the learning crisis through evidence-based reform. With a focus on not just what works to improve learning outcomes, but how to implement it at scale.