Subsidized advisory services from IPA’s Right-Fit Evidence Unit

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 long-term, evidence-based approaches in EdTech.

IPA’s Right-Fit Evidence Unit offers subsidized Research & Testing (R&T) advisory support to EdTech providers who are selected through a competitive process. This is not a grant, and no money will be disbursed to applicants. Rather, the funding from P4T-Ed means IPA can offer a subsidy on the usual costs of our advisory services to successful applicants, who will be expected to make a financial contribution. 

After the remarkable response to our two previous rounds, in February 2025 we launched a third call for R&T partnerships to continue addressing these and similar challenges in EdTech organizations and education programs leveraging digital solutions. Our third call for EOIs is now closed. We plan to open another round by the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026. Please reach out to p4t@poverty-action.org with any questions.

Strengthening Research and Testing (R&T) in EdTech

P4T-Ed Research and Testing (R&T) partnerships for EdTech organizations focus on generating and using evidence to refine products and programs. These partnerships do not include conducting impact evaluations. Instead, they are designed to help organizations improve their solutions by leveraging data and iterative learning approaches. For example, an R&T partnership could help your organization answer questions such as:

• How can we better understand our user base to design or refine our solutions?
• How can we create a monitoring and analytics system to assess the performance of our solution, both in terms of impact and growth?
• How can we prioritize and test product improvement opportunities to enhance user experience, impact, and efficiency?
• How can we identify the necessary adaptations before scaling the solution to new markets (e.g., populations or geographies)?

Advisory Support

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

• Research and Testing strategic support
  • Co-developing or refining an R&T strategy that could include learning-focused theories of change, a roadmap of learning questions, and R&T plans for program monitoring and improvement.
  • Assessing and identifying improvement opportunities within current R&T practices to optimize outcomes.
• Research and Testing implementation support
  • Conducting user-centered research to understand target user preferences and behavior, defining design principles, and optimizing service delivery.
  • Designing and implementing rapid testing methods (such as A/B testing) to refine features, improve take-up and learning outcomes, and embed these methods into the organization’s approach.
  • Developing and strengthening data systems to enable robust monitoring, testing, and advanced analytics for informed decision-making.
  • Designing, validating, and refining data collection tools to evaluate and enhance the effectiveness of data collection strategies.
  • Identifying contextual factors affecting impact, reviewing evidence to assess replicability, and determining adjustments to improve program performance and scalability.

Request for Expressions of Interest

Our third call for EOIs is now closed. We plan to open another round by the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026. Please reach out to p4t@poverty-action.org with any questions.

The selection process will take place in two phases: 

• Phase 1: Potential for influence | All organizations who have submitted applications will be considered
• Phase 2: Alignment with the P4T-Ed learning agenda and supporting early evidence of impact | Only shortlisted applicants will be considered. 

Please consult the EOI for more information on this EOI, including a detailed explanation of the financial structure of the partnerships, the eligibility and selection criteria, and others.

Previous Partnerships under P4T-Ed

Ei Mindspark: Behavioral Interventions for Data-Driven Adaptation in Schools in Southeast Asia 

Ei's personalized adaptive learning platform, Mindspark, is widely used across 10+ states in India as well as in countries like UAE, South Africa, and Mozambique. Mindspark not only offers personalized learning opportunities for students but also generates data that teachers can use to enhance their classroom teaching practices toward adapting teaching. Ei aimed to increase teachers' usage of students' data to make classes more effective. P4T-Ed is supporting them in designing and testing a behavioral intervention to shift teacher behavior toward accessing, understanding, and applying this data to implement adapting learning.

"Our partnership with IPA has helped us strengthen our research and testing, allowing us to apply behavioural insights to real-world challenges in teacher adoption of Mindspark. Their expertise helped us refine our approach to identify scalable solutions that tap into teacher motivations and motivate teachers to drive long-term teacher engagement. This has been a key step toward building a sustainable, teacher-led model for Mindspark in public schools."

Save the Children: A Data-Driven System to Scale Digital Reading Comprehension 

Save the Children Vietnam, in partnership with Optimal e-Learning Solutions, developed an app aimed at improving reading comprehension among school-aged children in Vietnamese and local ethnic languages. After a promising pilot, Save the Children wanted to figure out how to approach refining, scaling, and commercializing the app. IPA supported them to design an in-app data system to support key decisions. To design this in-app data system, IPA led a user-centered design process, including persona mapping and identifying the user journey for students, parents, and teachers. Along each user’s journey, key questions were identified that could inform scaling and commercialization decisions, and then metrics proposed to answer priority questions and inform key decisions. These metrics form the basis of the in-app data to be collected through a system being developed by OES.

Mentu: Building an A/B Testing System for Rapid Cycles of Learning 

Mentu, a Colombian Innovation Lab, leverages technology to develop AI-enabled solutions that aim to improve public education quality and learning outcomes across Latin America. To strengthen its ability to test and refine Shaia, a web based AI-powered teacher assistant that provides support to teachers on their daily practices, Mentu collaborated with IPA to build an in-house learning and experimentation system that incorporated rapid A/B testing cycles to drive continuous improvement.

Through P4T-Ed, IPA supported Mentu in developing a Learning Roadmap sequencing the development of infrastructure and experimentation efforts. This process included designing Shaia's Theory of Change, defining key monitoring indicators, and identifying A/B testing opportunities to enhance cost-effectiveness. Regarding system development, IPA supported Mentu in selecting an A/B testing platform to implement within its technology stack, and guided them through their first testing cycle. As part of this effort, IPA supported user research to inform the design of the experiments, helping align the A/B tests with best research practices and the users' contexts and needs. This engagement strengthened Mentu’s capacity to experiment and generate insights, laying foundations that enable them to iteratively refine Shaia and maximize its impact through a learning engineering process.

Scaling Localized Multiplatform Education Content in Sub-Saharan Africa 

This organization creates localized multiplatform education content that has been proven to improve children’s learning outcomes. As they work to scale their content to over 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, they are faced with a need to reconsider their learning approaches as they serve more children across more varied contexts. P4T-Ed is supporting them to develop an organization-level learning agenda to incorporate at-scale learning considerations. Additionally, P4T-Ed and this organization are co-creating a set of principles for a user research and testing strategy that is credible and feasible at large levels of scale while preserving their unique co-creation approach with children.

Coschool: A Cohesive Impact Narrative for a Latin American EdTech 

Coschool, a leading socioemotional learning EdTech in Colombia, faced a challenge common to many EdTech organizations: defining and measuring early outcomes—key indicators critical for program improvement and scalability. Through a series of participatory workshops, IPA, under its Partnerships for Tech in Education (P4T-Ed) initiative, facilitated the refinement of Coschool’s Theory of Change (ToC), identifying actionable early outcomes to track milestones like knowledge, well-being, and self-efficacy. IPA also guided the development of a tailored Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Plan and a Data Use Plan, enabling Coschool to generate actionable insights and iteratively refine its programs. 

Crack the Code

“Over the past two years, IPA has established itself as a key partner in the impact sector, driving an internal transformation to accurately measure our results. Through our work with IPA, we have laid the foundation for a robust measurement model, refining our theory of change, indicators, and evaluation tools. This process has not only allowed us to test and improve our strategies but also to move toward scalable measurement with a clear hypothesis about the impact we aim to achieve.”

- Aida Sarabia, Co-Founder & COO