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.
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