The Jacobs Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) have jointly committed CHF 6 million in the new Impact-Linked Fund for Education. The Fund targets high-impact enterprises improving learning outcomes to boost inclusive and equitable education for children and youth in in West Africa and MENA.
High-impact enterprises are important drivers of change. These enterprises often identify unmet needs of students or teachers or lay open insufficient, low-quality services of existing providers. Technology-enabled solutions, for example mobile-phone-based learning or artificial intelligence assistance, have huge potential for reaching vulnerable and underserved groups such as rural youth or refugees. The new Fund would connect high-impact enterprises and other market-based social organizations with reliable and suitable finance.
As a Foundation dedicated to transforming learning and education around the world, contributing to the Fund will help address education inequalities. Despite strong progress over the past decades, ensuring an inclusive, quality education (SDG 4) to vulnerable children and youth across the globe is far from reality. The economic and social crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated this alarming gap, with the risk of further increasing the already high financial disparities in the future.