Angela: I'm thinking about how philanthropy can show up when we're thinking about supporting the advancement of edtech. It's not about developing contracts with people, but really building relationships and starting from a place of listening, collaborating, building relationships.
Salvador: We don't want these interventions or these investments that are coming from the philanthropic or even private side to be alternatives to the existing systems. We want to alter the system, not be alternative to the system.
Elyas: Patient capital is important and also more funding into the very early stages to allow more people to take risks.
Anjali: Welcome to the IEFG Brains and Gear series. This is the last of the six episodes in this year's Big Series.
Through the episodes, we explored the questions and debates that education grant makers are engaging in, while supporting edtech initiatives together with practitioners and experts in the field. Today, we would like to take a step back, And look at the future of grant making for tech solutions targeting student learning.
And to do that, today we have with us Salvador Paiz from FUNSEPA, Angela De Barger from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Elias Felfoul from the WISE Foundation.
I'd love to start out with a quick introduction of each of you and how you think about the role of philanthropy in the future of edtech. Salvador, if we can start with you, please.
Salvador: Sure. Thank you, Anjali, and thank you for this opportunity. Let me just start, I guess, by a little bit of background on FUNSEPA.
We are a foundation which focuses on leveraging technology to improve the quality of education in Guatemala. For example, we have determined that in the schools where we have installed the computer labs, the abandonment, the rate of abandonment for children drops from 6 percent to 3%, basically half. That is a great deal, if nothing else, to keep kids in school. We're doing things like installing Wikipedia offline. We're doing things like utilizing Khan Academy offline, which is certainly not the optimal situation. We would hope that's my experience in Guatemala. Elias, what have you seen overseas?
Elyas: Thank you, Salvador.
And thank you, Anjali, for this opportunity to join you. I'm with an organization called WISE, the World Innovation Summit for Education. We have been trying to understand what's happening in the world of the intersection between technology and education way before COVID. So we started very seriously this work in 2013, 2014, where we wanted to work directly with founders of edtech companies.
And our DNA is very clear. We think there are Big, big challenges coming ahead in education. So what we've been observing with the work we've been doing is, first of all, there is a need. To increase the opportunities for founders that are coming from the global South, because most of the big challenges are necessarily in these emerging countries, and we need to offer opportunities for some of these founders, creator of solution to have access to a new type of funding, a new type of support.
And also platform and also learn from their peers that are doing successfully in other part of the world.
Angela: So maybe I'll jump in too and add on. It's really wonderful to be part of this conversation. So I'm Angela DeBarger and give you a little bit of perspective about how I'm thinking about this at the William and Flora Hewlett foundation.
I work in open education and that's really about making sure every learner can develop and create the knowledge that they need to learn. And so we invest in students, educators, scholars around the world to create Open and collaborative tools and practices that prepare learners of all ages to thrive and become leaders in their communities.
So when I think about this question about what philanthropy should do when it comes to ed tech, very much like my colleagues here on the call, I believe we need to pay attention not just to the technology pieces, but to the quality of the content and learning experiences overall. Making sure that digital resources.
Reflect the languages, cultures, identities of learners and that they're accessible and flexible and responsive to learners needs and interests. And so from my perspective, here's where open plays an important role. If materials are openly licensed, they can automatically have the permissions to be translated into children's home languages.
So children see themselves and their communities reflected and honored. And if the software for sharing core content is open source, then the learning management systems and tools that help teachers assess and respond to students needs can be more easily adapted and customized. And just to give a concrete example of what I'm talking about, one program that we've worked with is called FET.
They develop free, interactive, research based science and math simulations, and the code is open source. And they are designed to engage students in really exploring their curiosities and investigate questions around science and mathematics. And so they're quite engaging. But coming back to the big question, I really think it's important that philanthropy play a role in making sure that content stays centered around learners and community's interests, and it's delivered in a way that's safe, open, flexible and adaptable.
Salvador: I fully agree with you, Angela. I think that there is so much work to be done, and to be honest, I feel like governments especially in lower middle income countries are focused on such important challenges at the end of the day, but they don't have the bandwidth. to focus on some of these issues that we're talking about today.
How do we push the envelope on that content? How do we explore these new technologies that are advancing so rapidly and changing so rapidly? And I really believe that that's where philanthropy can have a role. That's where we can play, I think, a very important function. In helping to understand these technologies, helping to really understand that fit between the technology and the students and the communities, and how do we tailor some of these solutions to really be able to get it the most impact, but also do it in a way which is most appropriate given each context. So I, I fully agree with that. I wonder Elias, what have you seen on philanthropies? You've worked with many and you recognize many with your award every year.
Elyas: Of course I can respond to this, but I just want to compliment some of the ideas that Angela and yourself have just mentioned now in regard of the importance of having more philanthropists engage in this kind of conversation, but also redefining how they can be very supportive to enhance the implementation of edtech. I always use the example of health to say, look, health and tech works very well. And we could have probably been in such a difficult situation if we did not integrate better technology in the healthcare sector.
Why we're still having issues to Adopt and adapt to the technologies that could make our life easier, that could make the teacher's life easier, that would make the administration easier. And I don't have an answer to that, frankly speaking. All I know that we're reaching a level where it is going to become critical to find sources of funding to support ideas that are, hopefully going to improve the learning outcome through technology.
And that's where philanthropies could play an important role. There's more and more money. Some people in some families, they're making so much money out of all of these uncertainty in the geopolitical world we're living in. And I know a lot of them also want to give back. So one way to give back in education is to work directly with people that really want to solve problems.
A big percentage of them are founders, are people who are going to dedicate five to 10 years of their life to go and solve a problem. And those people need support. Now in edtech, it's been very hard. And I know a lot of folks out there who try to create those very foundational type of funding. And unsuccessfully because that tech is still not very sexy.
The return on investment is not any type of tech. And this is where our role to try to shift those mentality to say, look, man, the externalities are going to be very positive for everyone. There's no way we're going to be able to. to measure anything in education in a very short period of time. So we, we gotta be patient.
So patient capital is important and also more funding into the very early stages to allow more people to take risks. That for me is key to get us better results.
Angela: That's super interesting. Like the idea of funding to support taking risks. And I was thinking about what Salvador was mentioning earlier around experimentation and how that can happen in partnership with communities.
Salvador, I don't know if you want to say any more about how you're thinking about that notion of like experimentation.
Salvador: Sure. Thank you, Angela, because I think it goes precisely to the question Elias was also posing, which is, why is this not happening today, right? And I think it has to do with the political incentives of those in public service.
As citizens, we're allowed to do anything that the law doesn't specifically forbid. As public servants, we're only allowed to do the specific things that the law allows. public servants to do. And that basically creates a very rigid framework within they have to operate. And that's precisely where I think, Angela, the role of philanthropy to experiment, to push the envelope, given the context and the communities, we're not bound by the same constraints that public servants have in terms of spending public money.
Monies currencies of various sorts and i would say that that's really where we have found that we can add value and we've done some things for example we created a teacher training platform and because of our constraints it ran initially on a usb stick but angela to your point basically it was a learning journey.
Through the country of Guatemala, it allowed the teacher in a very contextualized fashion to learn about the country and learn about the various topics and the various competencies that we were hoping to build for teachers in a way that was also very familiar, very close to home. And I think that that's where philanthropies again can play a really key transformational role.
Important bit of it all is how do we then translate it into something that the governments can then scale nationally and have an impact for everybody, right? And not have this be a focalized impact for again, we've impacted 2000 schools. It turns out there's 37, 000 public schools in Guatemala to date, right?
And the only way to get to all of them, I believe, will be once we get The public policy to change and adopt the things that we have experimented with and that we have proven really drive transformational change.
Angela: That's really interesting. It's helpful to me because I've been sort of grappling with this.
I don't know if it's a real tension or not, but the notion of like scale and losing context and community. When you adopt a frame of scale. And I know a lot of the perspective around ed tech is like, how do we spread this and get this everywhere? But the example that you shared is really a nice one for helping me think about how local can still be really relevant and present and expanded technology as a lever for that, I guess, is how I think about it.
Elyas: Hearing your story, Salvador and Angela, you give me a lot of hope because what you basically did with 2000 schools is almost a testbed and you ultimately proven that the model works, right? From that perspective, I want to maybe touch upon a little bit the importance of testbed when it comes to the usage of edtech because one way to reassure the policy makers is to create those experimentations.
in a context that is relatively open to risk, and they have an incentive for stakeholders to use it, either parents, teacher, or administrator, and they can even be part of the group that are feeling that they're potentially contributing to make the case scalable, right? Then the challenge, it will be the policymakers.
But if already we succeed the test bed, That's already a great, great start because you already have the right elements to reassure, to reassure the, the, the policymakers and also the other schools that this is working. These are the steps. It's almost like a recipe, right? This is what we need to do. This is what we learned.
This is what we failed in, and we're going to avoid you with those failure. We're going to avoid you. What is not working and we're going to focus together on what is working in addition to seed money and the initial kind of money for risk takers. I think we need to add more money for testbed.
Salvador: I think that we can also add creativity to that list of what philanthropy brings to the mix.
And I'll give you another example here in Guatemala. Again, I mentioned, we have a very serious connectivity constraint. Less than 2 percent of all public schools have today internet connectivity. So five years ago, we started to think out of the box. How do we fix that problem? And we were able to propose to the government a solution whereby when they licensed the 5g spectrum.
That instead of that money going to the national accounts, that those monies would go into specific fund for internet connectivity, specifically for schools, hospitals, and police stations. Right. And today we have 150 million, which in a country like Guatemala, that goes a very long way.
Angela: And that infrastructure piece is really a critical role that we can play. And in the meantime, continuing to support tools that can bridge between where things are today and where things need to go in terms of like when that infrastructure is actually in place. Just to give an example, one of the organizations that we work with is called Learning Equality.
And they developed this tool called Kolibri, which is like an open source library of educational content. And it includes. Open resources from all over the world. And again, the platform's open source, but they're able to use this content offline. But then when internet access becomes available, there are ways to further build on that solid high quality infrastructure of.
Salvador: We are fans and users of Kolibri.
Angela: Okay, that's awesome
Salvador: I had a question in terms of what do you guys think about scale and promoting adoption and getting the ministers and ministries of education around the world. To adopt some of these ideas to kind of larger scale deployment, because in education, at the end of the day, at least I believe is we don't want to leave anybody behind.
We want to close those gaps, not amplify those gaps.
Angela: I've been thinking about this a little bit. I think it's a piece of the puzzle. I'm thinking about like how philanthropy can show up. And when we're thinking about supporting the advancement of ed tech, it's not about like developing contracts with people, but really building relationships and taking the space and the time, creating the space and the time to listen, figure out what's communities.
Really want and where they want to go and carve out the space to bring in the supports or other colleagues or collaborators to move that forward. So your broader questions about scale, but I also think about how we enter that space and enter the conversation that will hopefully eventually lead to widespread adoption and use of more effective tools and practices, but really starting from a place of listening, collaborating, building relationships. And I think oftentimes in philanthropy, we have the ability to be very intentional about showing up in those ways.
Elyas: It's a really interesting question, Salvador, and it's also a tough question. Minister of education from different parts of the world come with different challenges.
When I met with minister of education at Wise, the teacher training has always been. The top priority that one common challenge that most of them want to fix. I haven't seen some very interesting solution that could solve that issues at scale. If we can support more creators to find solution for problems related to teacher training, we can make some, some significant improvement.
Salvador: Our experience here in Guatemala, we turn 20 this year as a foundation, and we have worked with, I believe, nine different ministers of education in those 20 years. So when you look at it, the ministers wind up. Being constantly changed, right? And as we all know, education requires kind of long term commitments, long term bets.
That wouldn't be maybe another element that I would add to the, what philanthropy can bring to this equation is that consistency that's required. in order to be able to tell if it's the learning outcomes really changed or if it's that they didn't change because we're constantly going from the program from Minister A to Minister B to Minister C to Minister D.
The next point I think you make is fundamental, which is teacher training. We had a very large grant initially for 25, 000 teachers to be trained on the basic usage of technology in the classroom. I honestly thought the donor was a little crazy to think that we would be able to train 25, 000 teachers, where we've now trained over 94, 000 teachers on the usage of technology in the classroom, right?
So my initial bias was entirely wrong. Teachers, again, my experience here in Guatemala is they are thirsty for these opportunities to improve their own skillsets. They want to be better teachers for their students. I would hope that we all. Take that message and work towards what you're saying, which are some of these Creative solutions as to how do we drive teacher training and how do we improve their competencies and their skill sets? What we have done in that regard as kind of a version 2. 0 is to create now the teacher training platform on a mobile device. And we're launching that teacher training platform on mobile. We're hoping to train about 2000 teachers this year and eventually find a model to be able to scale that to about 20, 000 teachers per year.
Elyas: I just remembered where we were talking, we have supported in our accelerator, an amazing founder. He decided to go and create this company called instill education based in South Africa. And his dream is to educate or upscale all the teachers of Africa have been following the journey of this founder.
Now, if you look at what instill is offering either a degree or an upscaling program, everything is happening online through a transformative experience. And most of the teacher who went through their programs, have demonstrated some significant changes in the way they go to classrooms and they teach.
Those are the examples that need to be more amplified, in my view, because they're engaging the whole ecosystem. We're seeing some positive changes just because one teacher have upskilled themselves, they go back to the classroom, they do better job. And the kids are happier, their parents are happier, it's amazing the ripple effect of one teacher that has been trained.
There's a balance between the tools that the kids are going to use versus just learning through play or learning different ways. So maybe you can shed light a little bit more on when and how would you be able to. measure the results of the tools you have in some of the schools in Guatemala. That's going to be a very interesting story to tell, at least in Latin America.
Hopefully many people can adopt that.
Salvador: On outcomes, I would tell you that there's certain outcomes that we see day one, for example, on attendance. Day one, attendance changes, engagement changes. Everything really about the energy level at the school. The day that we come in to do these inaugurations, it's a big party for the entire town.
It's not even just the school, right? It's the mere fact that we're paying attention to these communities and we're working with these communities to help them. Create opportunities for themselves, right? Day one, we're seeing certain changes in behavior and changes in outcomes, but we're also seeing in the longer term, once we do the standardized testing, once we do things like these independent studies to validate the learning in this example, I mentioned at the beginning, 8.5 percent difference between the control group and the experimental group, if you want to call it.
Elyas: I really appreciate the story where you focus on the community because it changes the dynamic of the whole town or the whole region. And I find that very powerful.
Angela: That means so much to me because I think that if we want students to have certain kinds of experiences and connections, we need to treat Teachers in the same way and support them in learning and connecting in those ways.
It's really resonating with me, what you're both saying about the importance of community and building community among teachers and educators. And one example that came to mind as I was reflecting on this, we work with this group called AFLIA. They're a network of Librarians throughout the continent of Africa, and they've been working on training librarians in this case around open education and open educational practices.
I think one of the most powerful pieces of that is the WhatsApp space that they created where they can come in and. ask their questions of each other and, and really feel like they're not alone when they're exploring with new practices.
Elyas: There's no way we can succeed in having successful stories if we don't have the right partners in place. Again, Salvador with Guatemala, you have been successfully implementing these technologies. You must have had. to convince a lot of people around the table to come together to successfully have these technologies.
Maybe you can shed light a little bit on your experience.
Salvador: Thank you, Elias. Let me answer that with an analogy. Public private partnerships, I would add a third P or fourth P in terms of philanthropy. And the analogy I was going to use is two big bones and a cartilage, little cartilage in between, right?
Sometimes you have the big bone of government and the big bone of private. Enterprise, but they need that little cartilage in between called the philanthropy and the foundation and the on the ground NGO that makes this all work together in a way in which the privates and the publics don't grind each other and create unnecessary friction amongst themselves.
Right? So there, again, I see a very important role for philanthropy in allowing these public private partnerships to really. Move in a way which is, I think, productive and efficient and at the end of the day does not create unnecessary pain and friction.
Angela: I'm curious about how you support building trust there, because I think distrust sometimes gets in the way of opportunities for partnership.
I certainly see this in the space of open where there are really like diehard committed colleagues around the values and practices of everything. Being open and then there's sometimes like private entities that can add value around that, but there's still like some distrust around, well, how might we partner or what boundaries do we need to put in place to make sure that certain values around open are preserved?
I'm curious if either of you have experience around that.
Elyas: I think it goes back to simple initiative. You must start with a level of transparency and open communication about the topics. I think involving stakeholders in what I would call collaborative decision making. I mentioned initially the, the test, the importance of testbed.
Testbed is a way to reassure. If you convince a small group of people, testbed are way to assure. The policy makers and some other important influencer to join the effort and then training and support, professional development, the training that I mentioned, stories, good stories that have been successful.
It's so important. I mean, sometimes we complicate our life in education because we're trying to always have the facts, but we need to go back to the essence of, of us dealing together as human. What makes us human is. We need those good stories. So how do we make those good stories, successful, good stories, influencing the way forward?
The trust is coming also from the fact that there is issues related to database. There is issue related to security. So those aspects are very important to engage from the beginning. If need be, you know, clear policies, if need be clear rules, and then hopefully you would be able to create a culture around this.
Providing us the necessary environment to make things happen.
Salvador: And I would just add, I think that Elias is right with creating the trust and creating the stories. I would also say that philanthropy, being that cartilage in between those two bones, can help with that trust, right? Because we might not trust the political incentives of whoever's in charge at that particular point in time, or the profit incentives of the The private sector companies, but if you have somebody in the middle, who can almost act as an honest broker and an honest intermediary, who obviously hopefully has a track record of building that trust in each of those markets that you're trying to address.
There might be something to be said about the role of having that little cartilage in between the two big bones.
Angela: So in a way, it's both philanthropy playing that role of facilitator and connector. And in some ways it might be brokering some partnerships with the spirit of exploration. In other cases, maybe it is about a convening or bringing people together for conversation to find those connections as humans.
Build the relationships and see where it goes from there.
Salvador: It's almost that function of translation. They speak different languages, public sector and private sector, right? And you need somebody who's bilingual. You have to be bilingual and you have to build that trust and allow people to understand that you're in this for the right reasons.
This isn't about visibility or, you know, this isn't your political campaign or platform or anything of that sort, right? But once you create that trust, I think there's a lot of potential.
Anjali: I love the idea of collaborative decision making and the analogy of the cartilage that you brought in to facilitate trusting relationships and translation of ideas. I also want to get your thoughts on the role of philanthropy as a disruptor of the education system and, you know, to spread the best practices and knowledge in an efficient manner. How do you think about this in your work?
Elyas: If they get into the disruption of system, it can become very controversial, especially if they are philanthropy from, from outside of the national borders. People get very tense when they believe someone is coming with an external agenda.
Salvador: And building on that, Elias, I think that there's an important point here, which is how do you almost disrupt the system from within, right?
We are talking about disrupting the system. It just needs to be done in a way that the system doesn't reject that disruption. And I think we need to really focus on how that happens. How do we apply kind of systems thinking to That, including in that systems analysis, the natural resistance to change, the natural resistance to these disruptions that we're talking about.
Angela: I think it is about taking a stance of listening, connecting with community, figuring out where they want to go and playing a supporting role there. And it comes down to the people. Systems are made of people. And so creating those opportunities for. Connecting and building those relationships and collaboratively figuring out.
What's next is how I think about it.
Salvador: Absolutely. And if I may just add a last point to build on Angela's we don't want these interventions or these investments that are coming from the philanthropic or even private side to be Alternatives to the existing systems, right? We want to alter The system not be alternative to the system because a, that's not scalable.
That's not cost effective. That's at the end of the day, not what we're in for, but it goes back to my previous question and reflection about how do we get the system to adopt these policy changes and to scale them for national change?
Angela: I think the way we've explored that in our work at Hewlett in terms of how to spread practices and bring in other communities around work and in the case here around open education, it's been about collaborating with networks that are local and Community based and building relationships with them, developing that shared appreciation around the values of open educational resources and practices.
And then it's not the foundation coming in and saying, this is what you should, but it's like through that network, through that community that exists, where those relationships are already in place that their agreement to sort of take on and explore. In some of these new directions,
Elyas: There's no magic recipe.
You, you really have to understand the context. It's so hard to think that whatever works in a place would work in another place. The contextualization is a very, very important matter. Adapting to the reality of where you're. going to act is super important. In my view, that's the only way foundation or philanthropies can succeed in their objective.
If you take something that works in a place and you think you will just do copy paste in another place, we have enough evidence that this is the best recipe for failure.
Anjali: That's great to hear how you're thinking about systems change in the education space, and also how philanthropy can play a role in it by building collaboration and contextualization.
With that, we come to the end and would love to hear any closing thoughts from all of you.
Salvador: I believe that the role of philanthropy in driving some of those very, very important changes that need to occur at a national scale. But that are being experimented on and creating these proof points that we spoke about during this conversation.
I think those are very important roles that philanthropy can play in driving national change.
Angela: My closing message would be very simple around philanthropy staying focused on creating human centered. collaborative, connected learning, both for teachers and for students.
Elyas: For the final world, I would love to see more funding for more innovation and allow the ecosystem to take more risks in order to, to get the right level of scalability, hopefully the right level of innovation.
That will hopefully get us more equity in education at large. I'm a believer that we're reaching a point where without technology, we're not going to be able to solve the big challenges ahead of education.
Anjali: As all the speakers mentioned, EdTech will be a prominent feature of education interventions going forward, and philanthropy has a thoughtful role to play.
They can steer the market forces in ways that are more community oriented, supportive of new and intentional founders and seeding and nurturing networks and ideas that have great potential to hear more about these themes, do check out the rest of the five episodes in this series on EdTech and the debates around it, that philanthropy is having.
We hope that you enjoyed listening to the conversation. This podcast was brought to you by the International Education Founders Group. Curator and editor by Anjali Nambiar and post production by Sarah Miles. You can learn more about the IEFG at www. iefg. org and do subscribe to the podcast for more such thought provoking conversations.
