The Jacobs Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the 2026 Call for Proposals, with a total funding pool of USD 6 million and individual funding of up to USD 1 million to support projects to join the Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) initiative. This is an exciting opportunity for researchers to contribute to deepening our understanding of how children grow, learn, and develop across different times, places, and contexts.
LEVANTE is an initiative of the Jacobs Foundation. It brings together researchers from around the globe to coordinate data collection on how individual variability, group heterogeneity, and contextual variability influence children’s learning and development outcomes. LEVANTE has enabled the creation of the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary open dataset capturing the diversity of child development, with the goal of generating key insights to improve our understanding of learning variability and its association with learning outcomes worldwide.
This year, LEVANTE is seeking proposals for research projects that assess children aged 3 to 12 over time, focused on identifying underlying factors contributing to learning variability, and capturing the dynamic processes of learning through dense measurement approaches. We particularly encourage proposals that:
- Incorporate designs that have the potential to establish causal inferences on mechanisms underlying learning and development, or generate insights into how environmental and contextual factors, such as pollution, socio-economic conditions, and institutional reforms, contribute to shaping learning.
- Implement designs that use rigorous and dense data collection measures to study the links between short-term behavior and long-term outcomes, or advance our understanding of within-child variability and developmental trajectories using rich environmental data.
The call also encourages submissions from projects in underrepresented regions.
Applications are open from 13 April to 10 June 2026. Detailed information about the selection and eligibility criteria, funding guidelines, and application requirements, process, and timelines, along with the submission, is available on the LEVANTE website.
LEVANTE welcomes new research sites
Alongside the Call for Proposals, LEVANTE is excited to announce the successful projects from the 2025 call. This will see 8 new research sites joining the existing 13 sites, bolstering LEVANTE’s global reach and research base. These new sites include the Center for Inclusive Education at Bern University of Teacher Education in Switzerland; the Department for Education at GRADE in Peru; the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University in the United States; the Research and Development Divison, Ghana Health Service, at Kintampo Health Research Centre in Ghana; the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Monash University in Australia; the PHFI-Centre for Developmental and Lifecourse Research, Indian Institute of Public Health-Bengaluru, Public Health Foundation of India; the Department of Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy; and the School of Government at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
The addition of these 8 new sites to the LEVANTE cohort is a major milestone in expanding our international scope and generating deeper insights into the factors influencing cognitive and educational outcomes for children around the world.