(Photo by iStock/hadynyah)
Global education funding was broken long before the recent cutbacks to international aid. Even at peak levels, traditional financing models that relied on donors delivered a frustrating cycle: Promising pilots that couldn’t scale, innovations that died when donor attention shifted, and governments left holding empty promises. This meant short-lived progress and children’s futures hanging in the balance. Now, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that sub-Saharan Africa could face a decline in bilateral aid of 16-28 percent below 2023 levels, driven by deep cuts from major donors such as USAID and the UK Government. Private philanthropy is not large enough to fill the $5 billion gap.
A growing ecosystem of education innovators has developed evidence-based solutions that improve teaching, learning, and school management. Big Aid played an important role in scaling many of these innovations. However, despite demonstrating impact, they often remain on the margins of government systems, confined to small-scale pilots, donor-funded initiatives, or private school networks, rather than being fully integrated into national education systems.
As the world’s largest bilateral aid donors retreat, the path forward toward improved education outcomes must center on leveraging private innovation within government schools, ensuring that effective, affordable interventions are tested, possibly with external support, but ultimately scaled and sustained by governments themselves. This shift requires structured partnerships between governments and education innovators that move beyond traditional public-private cooperation. Rather than treating innovation as an external intervention, sustainable financing models must align with national education priorities and budgets from the outset and integrate solutions within existing public systems.
Elimu-Soko, an African organization, takes this approach when it designs cost-effective partnerships that enable governments to pilot, refine, and ultimately adopt private sector-driven innovations within their own education systems. At the heart of the Elimu-Soko model is the idea that high-impact, sustainable education reforms do not depend on large or ongoing external funding, but instead on strategic integration into government-led systems. We believe this model offers a blueprint that philanthropy can adapt when partnering with local governments to scale education innovations.
The Elimu-Soko model is built on three key pillars:
- Government-Led Decision-Making: Governments lead in setting priorities and selecting which innovations to pilot, ensuring alignment with national education goals and policies. Ministries of Education make strategic choices from a curated pool of proven private-sector solutions, such as structured pedagogy models, teacher coaching programs, and adaptive learning tools, with Elimu-Soko providing technical advice but not steering decisions.
- Systemic Integration: Selected innovations are embedded within existing public education structures, utilizing government teachers, schools, and administrative systems for delivery. This avoids costly parallel structures and ensures interventions are built for long-term viability within the system. For example, by integrating with national teacher training frameworks, leveraging government supervision mechanisms, and aligning with existing information systems or school improvement planning processes.
- Zero-Budget Increase for Governments: Interventions are cost-neutral for governments. The collapse of Big Aid is the second significant fiscal shock that governments have experienced in this decade (the first was COVID). While education spending has remained largely intact, governments don’t expect to have the fiscal space to increase education budgets in the foreseeable future (even if there is no additional fiscal shock in the near future). In this environment, expecting governments to pick up the cost of innovations in the future is wishful thinking. Innovations need to be designed in a way that leverages existing government investments (e.g., teacher training colleges) and any philanthropic investments in improving the system should be targeted, short-term, and fully funded from the outset.
Through this approach, governments become the driving force behind both implementation and scale. In Zanzibar, the Ministry of Education partnered with Elimu-Soko to improve in-service teacher training by selecting and piloting an innovative model from a private education provider, with the goal of long-term government integration. Elimu-Soko’s work with the government in Zanzibar offers three key lessons, illustrating how these pillars translate into sustainable, cost-effective education reform.
Lesson 1: Disrupt the Donor-Recipient Power Dynamic
Donors typically start with their own landscape assessments, define their own strategies, and then look for governments who are aligned with their theories of change. Governments, eager to attract donor dollars, endorse donor programs even if they are not at the top of their priority list. This dynamic leads to superficial government buy-in and as highlighted in longstanding analyses of global education financing, frequently contributes to program abandonment once funding ends. When external organizations drive solutions with token government endorsement, the result is predictable: weak commitment, fragmented implementation, and limited sustainability. Without meaningful ownership, even well-funded interventions fail to take root in national systems or survive beyond donor timelines.
The Elimu-Soko model fundamentally disrupts this power dynamic. In Zanzibar, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) identified teacher training as a critical need. Rather than imposing a predetermined intervention, Elimu-Soko helped the government establish its own competitive selection process to identify an innovator with a proven, evidence-informed pedagogy model to pilot in government schools. The call for proposals invited organizations with experience delivering teacher training in low-resource settings to apply, with selection criteria focused on track record of impact, ability to execute, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and potential for system integration. Ministry officials developed selection criteria, reviewed applications, and made the final selection of implementing partners with Elimu-Soko serving as a thought partner rather than the decision-maker. In the end, it was the ministry that made the choice to pilot TeachUNITED’s teacher training innovation over four other highly competitive offerings.
This inversion of traditional power dynamics created genuine government ownership, leading to sustained commitment that outlasts donor involvement.
Lesson 2: Start Where Government Funding Already Flows
Most education interventions struggle with a fundamental design flaw: They assume governments will find new funding streams to sustain them. Donors routinely fund interventions while overlooking a critical question: Who will pay for this when external support ends?
This oversight has practical consequences. Many countries lack budget commitments to fund innovations. Donors fund innovative programs for these contexts without clarity on whether governments will be able to commit future funds to them. Moreover, donors contract external implementers for these programs rather than government personnel, which means that when funding ends, there is a dependence on external support and a missed opportunity to build internal capacity to implement innovations. The learning is clear: Interventions targeting unfunded systems face inevitable sustainability cliffs, while creating system dependence.
The alternative requires mapping where governments already allocate recurring resources before designing solutions, e.g., target teacher training colleges with existing staff, leverage education officers already on government payroll, work within systems that have established funding streams. Innovations can then be integrated into these structures, improving efficiency without requiring new budget allocations. This approach works within fiscal constraints rather than hoping they’ll disappear.
In Zanzibar, MoEVT employs 120 full-time Subject Advisors who provide in-service training to teachers, i.e., there is an ongoing funding stream for in-service training. The government is preparing to scale TeachUNITED’s intervention through a government-led training-of-trainers (ToT) model. Ministry personnel will lead training, delivery, mentorship, and monitoring. If successful, the ToT model is expected to enable full government ownership and financing within two to three years, allowing TeachUNITED and donor support to phase out. The government also plans to embed the innovation in its pre-service teacher training curriculum.
This approach aligns with emerging best practices from Brazil’s Sobral education reform and Kenya’s Tusome early grade reading program, where leveraging existing government personnel, rather than parallel systems, proved critical to sustainable impact. Both programs drove system-wide improvement by training current teachers and working through existing supervisory and support structures. This marks a deliberate shift toward institutional integration, grounded in early evidence of impact and strong government buy-in.
Lesson 3: Ensure That Donor Financing Spans the Full Intervention Period
The education landscape is littered with interventions that showed promising results but collapsed when donor funding cycles ended. Examples include USAID’s Basa Philipinas (Quality Reading Program in the Philippines) and the UK FCDO’s Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), both of which demonstrated significant impact during implementation but struggled to maintain momentum after external support ended. In the case of Basa Pilipinas, gains in early-grade reading faded as the program was never fully institutionalized within government systems, with teacher coaching and materials dependent on external support rather than integrated into department of education budgets. The GEC similarly faltered post-funding due to delayed and inconsistent sustainability planning, limited government and community ownership, and a continued reliance on donor-driven delivery models that lacked clear pathways into national systems and long-term strategies.
In this aspect, Big Aid was not the worst offender. A number of private philanthropies have strategies that fund pilots and innovations, but don’t provide scale-up funding. Historically, the most successful pilots received follow-on funding from Big Aid, but that avenue is now closed. Private philanthropies must rethink their strategies and ensure that if they are funding any innovations for public school systems, they are providing multi-year funding until the innovation is fully embedded in the system (assuming the results are positive). Funding pilots without the support to scale them is disruptive for public school systems and wasteful of precious dollars.
Conclusion
In Zanzibar, the initial six-month pilot of TeachUNITED’s teacher training increased grade-level proficiency in literacy from 6 percent to 34 percent and numeracy from 5 percent to 45 percent, while outperforming the control group. The one-time cost of integrating this innovation into public systems is well below $5 per learner.
These results represent transformational change in children’s ability to read, write, and perform basic mathematics, creating foundations for genuine learning and future economic opportunity.
Elimu-Soko’s approach offers more than a stopgap solution to the current funding shortfall; it reimagines how education innovation can achieve lasting impact through genuine government ownership, systemic changes, and efficient resource use. In a landscape where traditional approaches to funding global education have struggled to deliver sustainable change, this model offers a clear path toward education systems that truly serve children long after donors have moved on.
Read more stories by Khamis Mohamed Abdi & Devang Vussonji.