Spotlight on:

Brighter futures

We find the most effective means to nourish potential and strengthen livelihoods, whether it's by improving access to information, resources, or opportunities.

The grants made by the Founders Pledge community to our recommendations delivered economic benefits comparable to doubling the incomes of 6.2M people for a year.

The impact our community has helped create includes:

Supplying

2.4M

people with reading glasses, improving their productivity and earning potential

Increasing iodine consumption for

13.5M

people for one year, improving health and earning potential

Providing student support across

28.4M

school years

Stories of impact

Boosting learning with Teaching at the Right Level

Half of the world’s children cannot read with comprehension after finishing primary school. Learning levels in Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly lower than other regions. Teaching students based on their age or grade level does not typically meet each student's needs nor provide them with a quality education.

Our community has donated $22.5M to Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), supporting their work across a dozen countries in Africa and delivering educational programming to 6.2 million students.

The funding allowed TaRL to expand its programming, in particular scaling up to support the entire Nigerian middle-upper primary school system.

TaRL's lesson content, which is more precisely tailored to each individual’s education level and abilities, has helped millions of children like Mohammed, Safiyah, and Nasiru learn numeracy and literacy skills based on their actual learning levels. Nasiru is learning a lot through the program:

“I was at the beginner level, now I am at the story level. I understood only one digit in maths, but now I can even do subtraction.”

Enabling education with Imagine Worldwide

Overcrowded classrooms and limited resources create a difficult learning environment, resulting in poor academic outcomes. In many African schools, only a small percentage of students achieve minimum proficiency in reading and math.

Our community has donated $11.3M to Imagine Worldwide’s programs in Malawi and Tanzania, delivering educational programming to 1.1 million students.

The work is changing the lives of many children, who now have access to traditional and digital resources and a more appropriate curriculum—primarily through solar-powered tablet computers loaded with educational software–to learn and excel.

“What I like about using the tablets is that I learn to read and solve math,” one student shared. Another said: “I have friends who dropped out because of poverty, but they returned to school because of the tablets.”

Empowering women with Bandhan

Almost 129 million people were living in extreme poverty in India last year. Without reliable sources of income, people struggle to meet basic needs and support their families, and too often lack opportunities to improve their situation.

Our community donated $6.4M to Bandhan’s Targeting the Hardcore Poor Programme (THP), lifting almost 57,000 people out of extreme poverty.

Alongside 13 other Founders Pledge members, Bhavesh fully funded a two-year Bandhan program cohort, helping lift 1,000 female-led households in India out of poverty.

One of Bandhan’s graduates is Rita, a woman living in Baburhat village, West Bengal, India and responsible for taking care of her two young daughters and her mother. She used to earn about $16 each month working as a maid, well below the threshold of extreme poverty.

After working with Bandhan, who provide training and assets to launch micro-enterprises, Rita now runs a successful garment business and is in a stronger financial position than ever before. Nearly all of Rita’s cohort now have an active bank account and can provide two meals each day for their families. Part of Bandhan’s legacy is continued entrepreneurship: some 85% of Rita’s cohort used their savings to begin a second enterprise.