Q&A: The Gates Foundation's evolving global education strategy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking for a new director of global education after Girindre Beeharry, who has led the strategy since its launch, said he will step down. When the Gates Foundation announced in 2018 that it would invest $68 million into global education over four years, it focused on what it called “global public goods” to inform local education policy reform. For example, it supported a dashboard to deliver governments data on what is happening at the classroom level to inform their policymaking. Over the past year, the foundation has expanded its work to more directly improve reading and math outcomes, often referred to in the global education community as foundational literacy and numeracy, or FLN. Beeharry, now an adviser to the foundation, sees an opportunity to reenergize the global education community by showing meaningful results in the next few years. In a recent article for the International Journal of Educational Development, he calls for the sector to focus on FLN in low-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. He assesses why, despite many decades of work, 9 out of 10 children in low-income countries cannot read with comprehension by the time they are 10 years old. “The reason I wrote this paper, it came from a deep sense of frustration that we can do better and ought to do better,” Beeharry told Devex. “I deconstruct why this question of prioritization is hard to do and why the accountability piece is, at this point, nonexistent.” Beeharry spoke with Devex about what he’s learned and how the global education community can hold itself more accountable for progress moving forward. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. “Philanthropy cannot … fund at great scale. Many people fantasize about the idea of Gates being the deus ex machina in the field and coming in with lots and lots of money. That’s not the case.” --— Girindre Beeharry, outgoing head of global education strategy, Gates Foundation It seems that with a $68 million commitment over four years, the Gates Foundation is dipping its toe in the water to see whether it makes sense to do more in the education space. Is that an accurate characterization? I think we began that way, dipping our toe in the water. But I think at this point there’s a sense that there’s a role for us to play. We moved from this startup-y kind of work I was doing to being more of a program area for us that now has some legs. So it’s not that we’re looking at exiting the sector; I think we’re going to be there to stay. That doesn’t mean an increase in funding for the sector. I think having less funding is actually helpful, at least for me, in terms of being able to be really sharp about the role of philanthropy in the sector. Philanthropy cannot backstop, cannot fund at great scale. Many people fantasize about the idea of Gates being the deus ex machina in the field and coming in with lots and lots of money. That’s not the case. So we’re looking at how we use this money, but I don’t think we’re anymore in the “should we, should we not” space. I think it is: We will, but this is the right rate for our program at this point. In a 2019 interview with Devex, you said: “We are asking ourselves what can we produce that is scarce in the education community that will allow people who either run programs themselves, or advise governments on how to run them, to do their own work better.” How has that worked out so far? The initial thesis we had was about what is scarce: public goods. If you talk to people in the education sector, there are a lot of questions about: “Look at health. They invest in public goods, and we don’t,” etc. And there’s truth to that. There’s not a lot of research, not a lot of “what works?” kinds of questions. So the initial set of grants reflected this bias towards public goods. “What does work? Give me exemplars — countries that have done well. Give me a sense of progress.” I think the big difference in the last year has been to say, “Are people really invested in or demanding those public goods?” And the answer I was getting was … it’s not mission-critical. The sense I was getting was there was no sense of urgency behind the work. And therefore the demand for the public goods was, “OK, nice, we’ll accept it, but it doesn’t change anything.” The fact that in education you can have publications like the SDG [Sustainable Development Goal] 4 report year after year with no data, obsolete data, data that makes no sense, and nobody’s raised the alarm about this, tells you something about the nature of the sense of crisis. If you want public goods to be used, you need to have demand for it. The demand for it will come from perhaps a greater sense of accountability for the objective you signed up for. So the scarcity we’ve seen in the market, in addition to the public goods, is those things around: Are people accountable, and are they prioritizing things, are they able to say, “We want to get this goal done properly; what does it take to get it done?” Our work has evolved from purely public goods into encompassing work on advocacy, like “why should FLN matter to you?” You can have all the talk you want, but you look at national priorities, how countries spend their money, and that’s not where their heads are. But at the same time, it’s completely critical to their success. When the Gates Foundation, together with the World Bank and U.K. Department for International Development, announced the global data dashboard to improve the quality of global education policy, some questioned whether this was really what countries needed most. What’s your reaction to that? I think there’s no substitute for countries wanting anything at all — which is why I sidestepped, a bit, this question of country accountability or country interest by saying, “Let’s focus on the countries who care.” If you don’t really care about FLN and I bring you a tool that tells you FLN’s not working, it’s not going to work for you. The question for me is more around: Within the group of countries that do care about FLN, is it a good tool, does it improve the dialogue, can it serve as an accountability mechanism? It measures the proximal indicators of learning — not just the learning outcomes themselves but the proximal inputs into it, like teacher quality, and you want to get a sense of whether you are making progress on those things. It’s too early to tell. I’ve only seen three countries do it: Jordan, Rwanda, and Peru. And then because of COVID [COVID-19], nothing has really been happening. So the jury is still out for me in terms of: Is it a useful instrument of dialogue with a country? Does it cause them to see things differently than they would have without it? So I’m not identifying it as a success at this point in time, but we tried it. Even if the foundation does not put more money into global education, could it play a more influential role in strengthening what you call the three legs of the “global leadership stool”: prioritization, performance monitoring, and accountability? Accountability — these proposals I make in the paper — are not money-intensive proposals: to say, “Hey GPE [Global Partnership for Education], could you review progress occasionally?” and “Hey World Bank, can you have an annual review of your progress publicly with the people who are investing in this?” If money is a constraint there, we’re happy to support. But it’s going to be a $100,000 proposal, a $1 million proposal, not a $1 billion proposal. So I think it can quite well be done within modest means. I’m not completely dismissing the lack of money as an issue, but I think the real tension is around data. The UIS [UNESCO Institute for Statistics], which collects the data centrally — the data it has today doesn't make a lot of sense. But that’s not their fault. They’re drawing from assessments that are dysfunctional at a country level. And that ought to be the bread and butter of what the World Bank, GPE, and others finance. So then you have this big gap in the market that is expensive but that can be easily folded into your program. The [World] Bank is doing a half-a-billion-dollar program to India, a billion-dollar program to DRC [the Democratic Republic of Congo]. Surely you can add a few hundred thousand dollars to look at learning outcomes.