While significant strides have been made to increase access to education in Africa, gaps remain in the quality of education, especially in rural and marginalized communities. Only 18% of all primary-school-age children in sub-Saharan Africa achieve minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics, even though most children are enrolled in school. To solve this problem, our team has worked with various partners to boost the quality of education across Africa.

Launched in 2021, Elimu-Soko unites governments, innovators, and experts in Sub-Saharan Africa collaborative workshops to catalyze solutions in the educational sector. With successful pilots in Rwanda and Zanzibar, Elimu-Soko has already achieved incredible results, and has recently established itself as a South African non-profit to be able to scale the work to other African countries. Elimu-Soko was initiated by the Hempel Foundation, in partnership with Devang Vussonji, and Dalberg Catalyst is the fiscal sponsor and proudly sits on Elimu-Soko’s Board of Directors. Axum is both the strategic lead of Elimu-Soko and the coordination and implementation partner, working across a range of different service providers to coordinate action while stewarding the overall program vision and strategy.

Elimu-Soko focuses on public school systems, which educate as many as 90% of students in Africa. While many stakeholders are developing innovative solutions to improve the quality of education in Africa, they are struggling to convince governments to scale up their innovations using public financing. Governments shy away from scaling up these innovations because they are not perfectly aligned with government priorities. Elimu-Soko breaks this cycle by putting the government in-charge – working with them to identify intervention areas and innovators, supporting the piloting process, and then scaling up successful interventions using public financing.

Our impact is tangible, with $1 million mobilized for pilot programs in Rwanda and Zanzibar. In Rwanda, the initiative implemented a program for 18,000 students, with grade-level proficiency increasing by 2X in literacy and 3X in numeracy within 6 months. Similarly, a pilot in Zanzibar will benefit almost 20,000 students, with goals to increase grade-level proficiency by at least 25% in literacy and numeracy. Elimu-Soko is now developing a fund which aim to impact at least 10 million learners in at least 5 countries in Africa.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.elimu-soko.org/