Taking Education Initiatives to Scale in Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire and Tanzania

The Millions Learning Initiative at the Brookings Institution is interested in how education initiatives can be scaled for all children and youth. To this end, the Initiative has set up Real-time Scaling Labs in supported countries to help participating initiatives to strengthen their scaling efforts, provide evidence-based guidance to participating organizations and suggest course-corrections, document each participant’s scaling experience, and generate evidence to fill gaps in the existing knowledge around scaling global education. The student research team at SIPA supported the Initiative’s efforts to document and tell the story of three of these initiatives in Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania in order to identify key lessons that are generally applicable to global education programs that seek to scale and deepen their impact. The team identified building diverse coalitions, incorporating adaptability into operational frameworks, being open to innovative delivery models, and emphasizing evidence gathering on outcomes and community-level processes as key to successful scaling strategies in international education.