Luminos Fund​

The Luminos Fund, headquartered in Boston MA, provides transformative education programs to thousands of out-of-school children each year, helping them to catch up to grade level, reintegrate into local schools, and prepare for lifelong learning. Luminos was founded to ensure children everywhere get a chance to experience joyful learning, especially those denied an education by crisis, poverty, and discrimination. Their vision is of a world where no child is ever denied the chance to learn. Luminos operates classrooms in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East where students live in very challenging circumstances. Many are the first in their family to receive an education.

Even before COVID-19 pushed children around the world out of school, 59 million primary-school-aged children were out of school globally. Children who are out of primary school are uniquely challenged to develop vital skills and keep up with educated peers over time.
The Luminos Fund’s core program, Second Chance, is an accelerated learning program for out-of-school children, and one of the world’s leading innovations in K-12 education. In just ten months, it teaches students to read and do math – to learn how to learn – through a joyful, activity-based curriculum, enabling them to catch up on three years of learning in just one school year.

Luminos programs achieve inspiring, long-term results. Upon completing the programs, over 90 percent of Luminos students advance into their local mainstream school, continuing on the path to opportunity. Even six years after completing the program and transitioning into mainstream schools, Luminos children continue to fare better than their counterparts. Graduates of the program complete primary school at twice the rate of their peers. A study suggests that the Luminos pedagogy – specifically its ability to build learners’ confidence – is a key factor in the success of the Luminos model.

To date, 152,051 children have been helped to experience joyful learning. As well as improved learning outcomes for children, Luminos also helps build local capacity and has helped in the training of 6,357 community teachers, fuelling local education systems with much-needed trained resources. A total of 14,242 teachers have been trained in partner government schools.

Having launched in 2016 as an experiment in using accelerated learning modalities in Ethiopia, Luminos is today a leading innovation in K-12 education, successfully replicating and scaling the Luminos model to five countries – Ethiopia, Liberia, Ghana, The Gambia, and Lebanon.