How a unique public-private partnership and philanthropic donations are helping to increase the early grade literacy skills of hundreds of thousands of government primary school children from across Nigeria

Improving educational quality and learning outcomes in developing contexts is essential for sustainable development but, so far, this has proved to be a difficult task. Some existing partnerships and funding arrangements have... [ view full abstract ]

Improving educational quality and learning outcomes in developing contexts is essential for sustainable development but, so far, this has proved to be a difficult task. Some existing partnerships and funding arrangements have been criticised for being too top-down and not a good fit with the particular context, resulting in little, if any, improvements in educational quality and/or a lack of sustainable systematic progress. As a result, new partnership arrangements and approaches to funding have been called for. Entering into these discussions, this paper will present an example of an ongoing and unique public-private partnership between the Nigerian Government, a not-for-profit organisation and a UK-based publishing company that is helping to improve the early grade literacy skills of hundreds of thousands of government primary school children across a variety of Nigerian contexts. As well as describing the roles of each of these partners, the paper will describe the partnership’s distinctive funding arrangements, involving the philanthropic provision of teaching and learning materials and training costs (worth over £2,000,000 to date) as well as extensive funding from the Nigerian Universal Basic Education Commission. Throughout these discussions, the benefits as well as capacity implications and/or constraints to this arrangement will be highlighted and, based upon these, the paper will conclude with recommendations for educational planning and resourcing in developing contexts. The research methods include the secondary analysis of existing texts and documents, such as Partnership Agreements and project reports, as well as semi-structured qualitative interviews, undertaken with a variety of stakeholders.