The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said Friday it will devote $68 million over four years to improve education for young students internationally, marking the foundation’s latest foray beyond its grant-making mainstays of global health and school improvement in the United States.
The money will be used to compile comparative educational data internationally and to support primary-school systems in India and at least two sub-Saharan African nations to be named at a later date.
Over its nearly 20 year history, Gates has become the dominant global health and development grant maker but has largely steered clear of supporting teachers and students outside of the United States.
“Everywhere we go, people always ask us this question: Why don’t you guys work in education as well?” said Girindre Beeharry, director of global education learning strategy, who is directing the effort.
The reason, Beeharry said, is that it is unclear what works. Although a multitude of private donors, international development organizations, and government entities support education, “you don’t see a lot of countries that have bucked the trend” of low educational achievement.
What’s missing, he said, is a comprehensive set of data on different educational approaches, particularly in poor countries. Collecting more information would allow educators and policy experts to examine new approaches such as changes in teacher training or the development of curricula, and see how they work in countries that have similar levels of wealth and comparable educational systems.
In recent years, researchers “have made a pilgrimage to Finland” to study innovations that have made that country’s educational system a global model of success. But what works in Finland may not apply in a less-developed country, where educational data is incomplete, Beeharry said.
“There’s quite a bit of murkiness about what causes educational systems to succeed or fail,” he said.
Branching Out
Global education is a departure for Gates, which has plowed billions of dollars into its international work. In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, the foundation directed nearly $4 billion to grantees in its global development, health, and policy programs. Its efforts to develop vaccines, improve HIV treatment, and address other health needs in the developing world have made it by far the biggest private grant maker to support public health.
The education program is much smaller, but it follows similar announcements that seem to indicate the foundation is branching out from its established ways of doing business.
In March, for instance, Gates established a gender-equality strategy and put $170 million behind the effort to improve women’s economic might in the developing world. And last month, the foundation deviated from its domestic strategy, which has long focused on education (and where the bulk of its domestic grant making will remain), when it set aside $158 million to fight poverty in the United States.
Other Grant Makers
Other philanthropies have invested heavily in pre-college education overseas.
This year, the Open Society Foundations plans to spend $18.3 million on primary and secondary education, plus $14 million on higher education and another $14 million on scholarships.
Kate Lapham, deputy director of Open Society’s Education Support Program, said grants are made “across the life span,” from early childhood through adulthood because there are “multiple windows of opportunity in human development” where education can be a positive force.
She said Open Society’s work reflects the philanthropy’s commitment to build free societies where all people are able to contribute to public discourse. “We target countries and communities where the civic space of education is no longer protected, where it is distorted by authoritarian or exclusionary political agendas, and where it is reinforcing social inequities instead of challenging them,” she wrote in an email.
Other approaches vary. The Mastercard Foundation has made education a big component of its $500 million commitment to train people for the jobs of the future, both in the United States and internationally. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation supports the development of affordable private schools in India that tie debt-financing instruments to school performance, and the Omidyar Network has invested in nonprofit and for-profit organizations that use technology to boost student achievement.
Focusing on Data, Evidence, and Tools
Much of the support from Gates will back data collection and analysis that will be used to determine future investments. But the foundation does start with a guiding principle: Start early.
If students fall behind when they are young — unable to perform basic addition and subtraction when their peers are learning about complex fractions — it’s almost impossible to catch up.
It’s a lesson Gates learned following a series of research grants it made with the Hewlett Foundation. From 2007 to 2013, the two foundations’ Quality Education in Developing Countries project spent $130 million surveying educational outcomes in Ghana, India, Kenya, Mali, Senagal, Tanzania, and Uganda. The grant makers determined that access to schools — getting “butts in seats,” in educator parlance — was not a major problem.
The key, Beeharry said, is to develop curricula that reward learning rather than grade advancement and pay special attention to kids who are adrift in the classroom.
While most of the foundation’s classroom efforts will be made through traditional grants, he said, Gates may make some impact investments in educational technology to address students’ varying learning capabilities.
“They’re coming to school, but they’re not learning anything,” he said. “Tackling that problem early on is fundamental to addressing the issue.”
Setting the Tone
According to the United Nations, support of education globally will fall short by an average of $39 billion a year of what is needed to achieve U.N. education goals by 2030.
Having a large player like Gates get involved will send a signal to other donors and governments that global education is a worthwhile cause, said Prachi Srivastava, professor of education and international development at the University of Western Ontario, who spoke without knowledge of the Gates investment.
But she offered a cautionary note. Having Gates enter the field, she said, could lead other donors to jump in blindly, without fully examining where their contributions can benefit the most disadvantaged students. Gates is viewed by some as setting a philanthropic gold standard, but a hefty series of grants in one area might steer donors away from making other worthwhile grants.
“Those initial interventions are important for setting the tone for future investments by others who might not be as well versed,” she said.
Srivastava said the data on philanthropic involvement in global education is lacking. She’s in the process of collecting data on the subject, and so far she has identified at least 650 donors who are active in Asia. American foundations are not as involved as they could be, she said, because there is a “mystification” surrounding the support of educational programs, whose success sometimes can’t be measured for a generation.
“If you institute a vaccine program, you can see the impact of that right away,” she said. “That model doesn’t fit with education.”
