Life is short. We are less interested in incremental progress, and a lot more interested in helping to advance meaningful new global norms. Through intensive research, we can find program solutions that address the biggest global problems – and yet are narrow enough in scope to achieve.

For example, Prevail spent 2.5 years finding our first program in improved foundational learning. Foundational education is one of the world’s ‘bedrock’ inequities: today, 9 out of 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa and 7 out of 10 in South Asia cannot read a simple paragraph by age 10, because they are not learning at school. For these children, education is over at the starting line. This matters globally – in just twenty years, 61% of the world’s youth will be African or South Asian. It is hard to imagine solving global inequity without addressing this ‘bedrock’ problem. This inequity also has profound implications for the growth of economies – talent is evenly distributed throughout the world, but today, millions of children are randomly filtered out of the talent pool by age 10.

It’s a massive problem – but improving foundational literacy and numeracy is also a goal that is focused enough to achieve. Specifically, improved literacy and numeracy instruction could realistically become a new global norm.

To find our first program, Prevail engaged in a research process over 2.5 years.

• We consulted many of the top academics and field implementers in global education.
• We did an independent literature review of global education meta-studies that compared more than 150 programs, and independent reviews of dozens of individual studies.
• We tested the information through field visits – including visits to failed programs – and by commissioning independent teacher focus groups.

There is no silver bullet in global education – but we discovered a family of programs that we believe could support about 1 million existing teachers to deliver more engaging, effective lessons. These programs:

• Provide training and coaching support to teachers.
• Provide an effective daily lesson plan that also makes teachers’ lives easier.
• Ensure that children have opportunities to practice through workbooks, smartphones, and/or resources such as storybooks.
• Sometimes utilize student tablets or smartphones to supplement classroom instruction.

These programs fit our 3 major criteria:

• Impact. Programs that improve instructional quality in classrooms have a strong quality of impact, including many high-quality randomized control trials (RCTs).
• Cost-effectiveness. Today, governments in Africa and South Asia spend tens of billions of dollars every year on Grade 1–3 education. By leveraging this existing spending, just US$20–40 in grants per child can significantly improve outcomes.
• Scale. Each field implementing organization works in close partnership with their country’s public school system – we believe some of these programs could reach whole-country scale, and help to achieve global-level success.

It’s easy to talk big, but Prevail seeks systematic ways to break big goals into achievable chunks. Here's how we do this:

• We find program solutions that already have strong existing field implementers who are ready to grow – but are severely under-resourced today.
• We actively support those implementers to grow their impact in the field, through our staff support and accumulated experience of growing large US$100M+ organizations.
• We rely on a clear feedback loop that starts with small funding to each organization, and grows only with proven success. Across a diversified portfolio of supported organizations, this significantly reduces risk per dollar.

There are many good solutions in the world – but reaching globally-meaningful goals also requires a strong set of implementing organizations, ready to scale those solutions up.

A key reason we chose improved classroom instruction (which includes a range of sub‑programs) is that there are many potential implementers – we believe we will end up funding 30–35 organizations to work with. And to be eligible, Prevail only considers organizations that partner together with their government to deliver change through the existing school system.

The average quality of organizations is strong. The organizations that we will fund have an existing, multi‑year relationship with their host government; at least one good‑quality independent study of effectiveness; and strong leadership teams. Based on dozens of field visits so far, we have built a reasonable confidence that there are enough fundable organizations out there already doing strong work aligned with our goals – and that we can help to scale bigger.

And yet, these organizations are severely underfunded today. We estimate that less than 7/10ths of 1% of strategic global philanthropy goes to primary education at all (OECD database 2024). As a result, nearly all of these organizations today are only serving a few school districts – the potential to grow their impact nationwide is untapped.

The Prevail education program starts with a strong set of eligible implementers – can many of them grow their impact significantly?

Prevail’s full-time team members have helped to grow organizations from US$0 to US$100M+ and thousands of staff. We believe we can add unique value to our implementing partners by helping them build scalable organizations. We have helped implementers to define their core ‘operating unit’ before scaling; make more systematic 5-year scale plans; increase their hiring pipeline by 5X; improve daily data flows and performance management; lower unit costs; and secure new grants (from other grant‑makers).

We are familiar with the ‘scale playbook.’ It is highly possible for field implementers to generate consistent, steady growth over sustained periods of time. This requires improving operating consistency and growing many individual departments including program delivery teams, HR, finance and accounting, and measurement and innovation. For example, many education organizations currently do not have a full-time government relations lead (despite the fact that their entire program is executed through the government). We can help them to hire a government relations leader, to identify 50–100 key stakeholders in their ecosystem, and to ensure that these stakeholders are meaningfully engaged on a regular basis.

While we do all of this work, we put high value on locally-proximate implementing organizations, and actively promote feedback loops from local stakeholders. We can help organizations to systematically incorporate proximate voice as they scale – through client reference groups, local stakeholder engagement, and qualitative/quantitative methods.

Truly big goals require persistence. We take a uniquely long time frame of 10–15 years. We can support organizations for a decade or more, with both resources and technical scale support.

This is a simple question with profound implications. If we can clearly measure results, then we can quickly see how each organization is doing, and increase/decrease funding with success. We can create a process that takes in dollars, and reliably produces student outcomes across our portfolio of partner organizations.

A major advantage of pursuing a targeted goal like child literacy and numeracy is that every implementer that we fund has one simple, highly-measurable metric: results for kids. This also makes it relatively easier to evaluate the impact performance of our total fund.

We use student outcome metrics to inform many rounds of funding, over long periods of time – ensuring that the great majority of dollars will be spent with high impact effectiveness. Prevail starts with small grants for each implementer who already has strong evidence of success. From there, we use shared data and evidence to guide the scale‑up of funding: implementers simply demonstrate success to access higher funding.

Therefore, every dollar follows results, and most funds will be spent on programs that have demonstrated clear success over multiple years. Prevail additionally will build a diversified portfolio of dozens of organizations, enabling us to dynamically manage a portfolio over many years. If a particular country or implementer is having a few rough years but has long-term potential, we can patiently work to prepare them to grow when the time is right.

A portfolio approach where dollars follow results can actually lower the risk per donor dollar. We should set ambitious plans and take risks – but we also work constantly to limit the downside of those risks.

What about the funding side of things? Achieving bold goals requires bold resources. A key Prevail thesis is that larger chunks of philanthropy (in the range of US$1B+) are big‑enough to make larger forces such as markets and government more effective.

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance. As we speak with givers, we sense a strong appetite to support bolder social change – but also a logical reluctance to leap off of a massive cliff on day one, and a lack of execute-able opportunities at a truly big scale.

Prevail seeks to significantly lower the riskiness of pursuing big goals through innovative funding structures. For example, we divide the funding load and risk among several givers by actively coordinating a small team of philanthropists. We also create option value for individual givers to off‑ramp without collapsing the whole project – with Prevail being responsible for replenishing their giving role. We want givers to be able to pursue bold goals – but without having to jump off a big cliff on day one.

We get additional leverage by utilizing large‑enough pools of philanthropy to work through larger resource pools. In the example of the education project, for every US$1 of philanthropy, we will help to improve the effectiveness of US$20 of existing public education spending. Host governments are already spending large sums on teacher salaries and classrooms – philanthropy funds the implementing organizations that can help their host governments improve what is actually taught and how it is taught.