The Teaching Innovation Lab (TIL), led by education innovation firm, Elimu-Soko, with support from the Gates Foundation, has opened a new funding call aimed at improving foundational literacy teaching across African public schools.
The programme is seeking low-cost, scalable innovations that can strengthen how teachers are supported in classrooms, without relying indefinitely on donor funding.
Under the call, organisations operating in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, and Mozambique can apply for grants of up to $150,000 to design and pilot solutions focused on foundational literacy and numeracy.
Selected pilots will run for six to 12 months and are expected to reach a minimum of 200 teachers, with larger cohorts encouraged to enable comparative analysis of cost, effectiveness, and scalability.
What You Need to Know
Elimu-Soko says the initiative is driven by a persistent challenge across African education systems: while effective teacher professional development (TPD) programmes exist, many remain financially unsustainable for governments to adopt at scale.
According to the organisation, the most successful TPD interventions across the continent are often donor-funded and resource-intensive, making them difficult for public education systems to maintain once external funding ends. As a result, proven approaches frequently stall at the pilot stage, leaving teachers without consistent instructional guidance or coaching.
“Most successful TPD programmes have been funded by external donors at costs that exceed what governments can sustain,” Elimu-Soko said, noting that education systems are often forced to trade off programme reach for quality.
This funding dependency, the organisation argues, has limited the ability of governments to scale effective teacher support, weakening classroom instruction and slowing progress in literacy and numeracy outcomes.
Why Teacher Quality Remains Central to Learning Outcomes
The Teaching Innovation Lab is anchored in a growing body of evidence showing that teacher quality is the single most important school-based factor influencing student learning.
Research from low- and middle-income countries consistently finds that structured pedagogy programmes, which combine detailed lesson plans, high-quality teaching materials, and continuous instructional coaching deliver some of the strongest learning gains among education interventions.
One frequently cited example is Kenya’s Tusome literacy programme, which reached approximately 7 million learners across nearly 24,000 primary schools and recorded significant improvements in reading outcomes. Similarly, global meta-analyses have shown that instructional coaching not only improves teaching quality but also helps sustain those improvements over time.
Despite this evidence, Elimu-Soko notes that many African education systems still struggle with limited daily instructional support, weak coaching capacity, fragmented professional development frameworks, and poor use of classroom-level data to inform teaching practice.
Testing Whether Innovation Can Shift the Cost Curve
The central question the Teaching Innovation Lab seeks to answer is whether innovation can close the gap between effectiveness and affordability.
“The frontier we seek to explore is whether innovations can deliver meaningful improvements in teaching quality at costs governments can realistically manage,” Elimu-Soko said.
Rather than introducing parallel systems, the programme is specifically looking for solutions that strengthen existing government-led teacher development structures, making them more effective while remaining financially viable at scale. The focus is on foundational literacy and numeracy, where early instructional quality has long-term implications for student outcomes.
For African founders and education innovators, the programme offers not only funding but also a platform to test whether classroom-level innovations can transition from pilot projects into system-wide reforms.
Application Details and Next Steps
Applicants are required to submit proposals that clearly define the classroom challenge being addressed and explain how the proposed intervention is expected to improve teaching quality or learning outcomes. Proposals must also outline implementation and measurement plans, including how impact will be assessed.
Crucially, applicants are expected to demonstrate a credible pathway for integration into government education systems, signalling how the solution could be adopted and sustained beyond the pilot phase.
Elimu-Soko said all application documents must be submitted in PDF format and sent to info@elimu-soko.org. Following the initial screening, shortlisted expressions of interest (EOIs) will be invited to submit full proposals and will receive feedback highlighting areas that require further development or clarification.
Finalist proposals will then progress to an interview stage, after which selected organisations will work closely with Elimu-Soko and partner governments to co-develop and refine their pilot approaches ahead of implementation.
For more detailed and concrete information on the programme’s objectives, expectations, and pilot design criteria, interested organisations are encouraged to consult the Teaching Innovation Lab pilot summary website.
The deadline for submitting expressions of interest is January 30, 2026. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit full proposals by February 27, 2026, with final funding decisions expected in March 2026.
As African governments face mounting pressure to improve learning outcomes with limited resources, educationists say initiatives like the Teaching Innovation Lab highlight a growing shift in education funding.
Talking Points
It is significant that the Teaching Innovation Lab is directly addressing one of Africa’s most persistent education challenges: improving teacher quality in a way that governments can actually afford to sustain.
By offering up to $150,000 in pilot funding across multiple African countries, the initiative creates room for innovators to test practical, classroom-level solutions rather than theory-heavy reforms that rarely survive beyond donor cycles.
At Techparley, we see this as a shift from “what works in pilots” to “what can work at scale”, especially in public school systems where limited coaching, fragmented professional development, and weak classroom data continue to undermine learning outcomes.
However, the real test will be sustainability. For these innovations to succeed, they must integrate seamlessly into existing government teacher development systems, remain low-cost at scale, and reduce dependence on long-term donor funding.
As the Teaching Innovation Lab progresses, there is a clear opportunity for African founders to prove that locally designed solutions can strengthen foundational literacy while aligning with public sector realities. If successful, this could reshape how teacher professional development is funded, delivered, and scaled across the continent.
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