Beyond Big Aid: Forging new pathways for impact and scale in education

Event Description

As traditional sources of large-scale aid like USAID retreat, civil society organisations (CSOs) are facing a strategic crossroads. In the education sector, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. While targeted programmes – such as those focused on foundational literacy and numeracy – have demonstrated strong evidence of impact, they often operate in isolation. What remains far less understood is how to optimise the wider education ecosystem in which these interventions sit. Without stronger coordination, collaboration and alignment between actors, even the most effective programmes risk limited or unsustainable impact.

This session will bring together four organisations working at the cutting edge of educational reform to ask: how can we move beyond a fragmented ecosystem to more coherent, systemic approaches to change? Rather than viewing organisations and initiatives as competitors for ever-scarcer resources, how might we forge new models of partnership and shared purpose? And how can we reimagine the role of implementing organisations – not just as deliverers of standalone interventions, but as amplifiers of impact within broader systems?

The session will explore diverse approaches to this challenge from STiR Education, Global School Leaders, TeachUNITED and Generation. Collectively, the session will highlight how these approaches can shift the paradigm from siloed projects to interconnected systems thinking. It will explore how to create the right incentives, behaviours and enabling conditions for collaboration to flourish – whether through shared metrics, open data, co-designed solutions or pooled funding mechanisms.

We'll be hearing from the following individuals:

● Mark Butcher, Associate Director for Amplification and Advocacy, STiR Education
● Magdalena Fernandez Lemos, Chief of Growth, Global School Leaders
● Heather Hiebsch, Chief Executive Officer, TeachUNITED
● Kelly Cassaro, Chief of Learning, Generation
● Moderated by Euan Wilmshurst, Trustee, STiR Education

Participants will come away with a deeper understanding of what systemic, collaborative approaches to education reform can look like in practice. They will hear honest reflections on what it takes to build trust and alignment across multiple actors, and how to avoid the common pitfalls of fragmentation. In a world where resources are increasingly constrained, this session will offer a hopeful but realistic blueprint for achieving more together – by aligning efforts rather than duplicating them.