Support highly-impactful, evidence-based solutions to improve education for children around the world. 

## The Founders Pledge Perspective

In 2000, the UN set this Millennium Development goal for education: “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.” By 2015, 91% of primary-school-age children globally [were enrolled](https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/education.shtml) in school. But access to education did not directly lead to improved learning outcomes. In 2018, more than half of children and adolescents worldwide [did not meet](https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/) minimum proficiency standards for math and reading. Many of these children live in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa where average years of schooling is the [lowest in the world](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mean-years-of-schooling-long-run?region=World). 

Unsurprisingly, poverty is a key factor in reduced learning outcomes. Children often start school underprepared due to malnutrition, lack of familial support, and unstable home environments. At school they encounter undertrained and underfunded teachers. These challenges are compounded by lack of educational resources in classrooms. Spending on education is 10-100x lower in low- and middle-income countries than in wealthy countries. In this challenging environment, resources are often focused on the most gifted students, leaving many others behind.

Our top charities work to ensure that students enter school prepared, with adequate nutrition, and attend schools where they can actually learn. By giving to the Founders Pledge Education Index, you can spread your donation across several highly-impactful and neglected global education initiatives to support improved learning outcomes. By pooling your donations, this Index allows you to make larger grants and thereby maximize your impact. 

## Our Approach to Grantmaking

When evaluating potential grants, we consider several key points:

- **Counterfactual impact**. Our grants are designed to create a meaningful outcome that would not otherwise have happened. In particular, we aim to make grants that otherwise wouldn’t have been made, rather than those which just take the place of other philanthropists’ donations. This means that you can rely on the Funds to create meaningful, real change, rather than just maintaining the status quo.
- **The grant’s potential outcomes**. We focus on outcomes (e.g. how many lives were saved), rather than outputs (e.g. how many products were delivered). We review all the available evidence and take into account cost-effectiveness to assess whether the grant money could produce more good if donated elsewhere.
- **The organization’s funding gap**. Not all organizations are set up to scale up their programming and many can’t productively absorb large amounts of unsolicited funding. We evaluate all potential grantees’ capacity for growth and consider how much money they could put to good use.
- **Organizational strength**. Particularly with unrestricted funding, it’s important to have trust in the leadership and capacity of the organizations we support. We look at their track record of success and their transparency about failures as well as successes, and we only support those organizations which are exceptionally well run. We also look for organizations that demonstrate a strong commitment to measuring outcomes and evaluating the impact of their programs.

Global Education Index

Founders Pledge is a global nonprofit empowering entrepreneurs to do the most good possible with their charitable giving. 

We equip members with everything needed to maximize their impact, from evidence-led research and advice on the world’s most pressing problems, to comprehensive infrastructure for global grant-making, alongside opportunities to learn and connect. We’re grateful to be funded by our members and other generous donors. 