Up to 50% sponsored research and testing partnerships in EdTech

About Partnerships for Tech in Education (P4T-Ed)

The Partnerships for Tech in Education (P4T-Ed) initiative, established by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Jacobs Foundation, aims to unlock the potential of technology to enhance learning outcomes globally, by fostering a long-term, evidence-based approach in EdTech.

Strengthening Research and Testing (R&T) in EdTech

P4T-Ed will support EdTech providers to use data and evidence to improve their solutions and have more impact. Advancing these goals could involve addressing the following challenges:

• How can we better understand our user base and design our solutions to meet their needs?

• How should we prioritize among product improvement opportunities to enhance take-up, user experience, and efficiency?

• How can my organization create an analytics and monitoring system that tracks both impact and growth?

• How can we generate credible evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution and strengthen a cohesive impact narrative?

• How can we identify the necessary adaptations before scaling the solution to new markets (e.g., populations or geographies)?

After the overwhelming response to our first round in 2023, we are pleased to open a second round of sponsored R&T partnerships to solve these and similar challenges with organizations implementing education programs with digital or EdTech solutions.

We expect to launch two further rounds of partnerships in late 2024 and early 2025.

Building on the lessons from IPA’s review of the EdTech evidence landscape, the technical assistance could fall under these high-level categories:

• Developing or refining R&T strategy, which can include:

  • Co-developing an R&T strategy for product improvement; and

  • Assessing current R&T strategies to identify areas for improvement.

• Providing capability strengthening support for R&T execution, which can involve:

  • User research and applying user-centered design principles;

  • Implementing rapid cycle testing methods like A/B testing, prototyping, and piloting focused on users, content, or operations;

  • Leveraging data and analytics to inform decisions; and

  • Reviewing internal and external evidence and assessing the potential for replicability of findings across different contexts.

P4T-Ed will sponsor 50% of the R&T support costs for the organizations selected through a competitive process. It will thus be expected that selected organizations bring additional resources to cover the 50% remaining of the R&T partnership costs.

Request for Expressions of Interest

To learn more about funding requirements, eligibility criteria, and selection criteria, please visit the Request for Expressions of Interest. While the request for expressions of interest will close at the end of day (11:59pm Eastern Daylight Time) on Friday, May 31, 2024, applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Therefore, we encourage interested organizations to send them as early as possible to increase the chances to be selected. Interested organizations can submit their expressions of interest using this online form.

We invite EdTech organizations to join our Q&A session on Thursday, May 23, 2024 to learn about P4T-Ed. There will be two Q&A sessions on the same day to accommodate different regions/time zones. Please see below for the links to register for either of the two sessions:

• Asia/Africa (7AM ET): Register here
• Americas (2PM ET): Register here