arrow left Back
close
arrow left Back
close
arrow left Back
close
arrow left Back
close
close

Search

Search
Join our community
search glass

Impact at Scale Labs

Home / Impact at Scale Labs

The Impact at Scale Labs programme provides catalytic funding and tailored support to help promising, locally-led education organisations scale their impact. The programme works with grantees to generate and distil evidence and learnings on what works in education and why, sharing these findings to inform national, regional, and global policies and programmes.

Strategic Priority

Knowledge Accelerator

Funding Catalyst

Partnership Builder

GSF has launched three cohorts of the Impact at Scale Labs
Lab-1

Innovations for Learning Recovery post COVID-19

Focused on supporting three organisations across India, Ghana and Kenya to accelerate their learning recovery in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lab-2

Early Years in Kenya

Focused on supporting four locally led organisations that are playing an increasing role in improving access to and quality of childcare and early childhood education and development provisioning in Kenya.

Lab-3

Foundational Literacy and Numeracy

Focused on supporting seven organisations in Sub-Saharan Africa and India on scaling effecting methods to improve teaching and pedagogical approaches.

The programme offer includes:

Intensive and individualised coaching support

We provide intensive and tailored coaching, leveraging our deep in-house expertise on education evidence, partnerships, finance, and scaling support with the ability to quickly commission support from an engaged global network of practitioners and researchers, many deeply rooted in the target geographies.

Flexible funding

Our grants of up to £250,000 contribute to making organisations’ scaling plans a reality. 

Peer-to-peer learning

We support organisations to build relationships with scale partners such as governments and funders, and to embed their solutions within their contexts.

Relationships for scale

We support organisations to build relationships and embed their solutions within their contexts.

Strong engagement and networks with policymakers, researchers, and funders in the global education ecosystem

We provide opportunities to actively shape the learning agenda around what it takes to scale innovations in low- and middle- income contexts by engaging in key events such as UNGA, Education World Forum, Skoll World Forum, WISE Summit, CIES, UKFIET, national and regional conferences and summits, and bilaterally with funders and policymakers.

Image

What do participating organisations get from the Impact at Scale Labs programme?

  • A solid foundation for scale, including a tested and evidence-based scaling and sustainability strategy;
  • Enhanced internal monitoring, evaluation, and learning capacity and an orientation towards evidence-based iterations;
  • A network of peers, mentors, funders, and scale partners to support their scaling journey that continues to grow with their membership at GSF.
Image

What do policymakers and funders get from the Impact at Scale Labs programme?

  • Actionable insights and evidence on the potential of promising education solutions to scale impact;
  • Practical examples of how promising solutions scale in education, including key challenges and opportunities;
  • Lessons on enabling environments, including policies and partnerships that support effective scaling of solutions in the education sector.
Our programme design is informed by the following
key ingredients of scale

Engage deeply with the key ecosystem partners required for scale

We support organisations to align their promising solutions with government priorities and embed delivery within existing systems, while also facilitating the engagement of additional scale partners to strengthen implementation.

Make funding and support for scale as flexible as possible

We target our funding and support at helping education innovations bridge the “valley of death”, where promising solutions often fail before achieving scale because of a lack of flexible funding support and guidance.

Invest in producing and sharing evidence

We support organisations to test and document as many elements as possible at the pilot stage, leveraging data to provide feedback into the scaled design.

Grantee testimonials

Engaging through the Labs with other participants and with the GSF team has helped us to refine our strategic vision.  This happened to be very timely for Dignitas, as we’re also in the process of launching our new strategy for 2023-2028.  This means we have been able to align the strategic vision for our innovation, our strategic vision for scale, and our strategic vision for impact in powerful ways.

Dignitas

In the last year, GSF has helped Gyan Shala to constantly step back and evaluate the APS programme based on new MEL data and learnings. This has helped Gyan Shala develop a more effective business model, a more accurate financial model, and has helped the organisation take strategically more sound decisions for its APS programme.

Gyan Shala

The Impact at Scale Labs has been a fantastic opportunity for Sabre, and an excellent learning experience for us as we enter the private school market. The ongoing coaching and mentoring, interspersed with the step-by-step workshops, has been incredibly valuable. Thank you very much for your support and expertise.

Sabre Education

This has been the most outstanding coaching experience I’ve ever had. The entire process, from formulating study questions to developing the case study and adaptation tracker, was exceptionally high-quality and beneficial for us. Most importantly, this coaching was incredibly valuable in addressing the gap we identified during our application for this lab: our organisation’s need for a more effective data collection system.

Simon Wamu

Founder and CEO, Education Empowerment for Rural and Urban Slums Initiative.

The Lab’s DVF framework has been very helpful in providing structure and planning for Sabre as we develop our work with low-fee private schools (LFPS) in Ghana. The DVF framework gives us a pathway to understand the market and viability in terms of low-fee private schools.

Susan Place-Everhart

CEO, Sabre Education

Our motivation

Read more about our motivation to launch the Impact at Scale Labs in this UNESCO World Education blog: 'Transforming education will require innovation, not just money.'

Read here

Related Projects

Knowledge Accelerator
Funding Catalyst
Partnership Builder

Impact at Scale Labs – Innovations for Learning Recovery

Impact at Scale Labs - Innovations for Learning Recovery supported three grantee innovations that improved learning recovery post Covid-19 in India, Ghana and Kenya for evidence driven scale-up of their foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) and early childhood education and development (ECED) programmes.

View Project
Knowledge Accelerator
Funding Catalyst
Partnership Builder

Impact at Scale Labs – Early Years in Kenya

Impact at Scale Labs – Early Years in Kenya supports locally led organisations that are playing an increasingly important role in improving access to, and the quality of, childcare and early childhood education and development in Kenya.

View Project