Today, millions of children across Africa are unable to read or write this sentence. A staggering 9/10 children leave primary education without the foundational literacy and numeracy skills they need to fulfil their potential and thrive in adult life. As with many societal realities such as this, there are many contributing factors. But probably the most influential thing that can affect a child’s learning is their teacher. And too many teachers don’t get the training, tools and ongoing support they need to fulfil the promise of education. At Inspiring Teachers we’re committed to supporting teachers to ensure they have the tools to succeed.

Across many primary schools, too many children fall behind, and fail to ever catch up. And a staggering 9/10 children leave primary school unable to read or do basic maths. The single biggest factor influencing how much children learn is the quality of teaching - yet too often, teachers lack the training, ongoing support, and practical resources they need to succeed. Inspiring Teachers is focussed on changing that. We create programs and tools that equip teachers with the right tools, coaching, and systems of support so that great teaching and learning can become a daily reality in their classrooms.

Our focus is on designing interventions to be rolled out across government schools. That said, we collaborate with NGOs and education partners that share our mission of improving teaching quality at scale to run our programs in low cost private schools, too.

Our teams in Ghana and Uganda partner closely with governments to embed our programs and tools into the system, which not only builds local capacity, but ensures our interventions have the best chance of longevity. Whether it’s building co-funding or cost-sharing models, the more integration there is between us and the ministry of education, the greater the chance of successful adoption and scaling. One of our most recent initiatives is working with the Ghana Ministry Of Education to build management dashboards that gather data in schools using our mobile application to provide real-time data on on teaching and learning, as well as attendance and program delivery.

We co-create programs that respond to national priorities and are integrated into existing education systems, rather than running in parallel. By balancing top-down alignment with bottom-up design and testing in schools, we ensure our initiatives address real classroom challenges while remaining scalable, sustainable, and fully owned by government.

Over the past 18 months we have been building an increasingly robust monitoring and evaluation strategy. We’re currently in the middle of a 3-year RCT to measure the impact of our TFLI program in Uganda, with early results proving to be very encouraging. Alongside this RCT, we are constantly running small pilots and testbeds, with the aim of continually making our interventions cheaper, simple and more scaleable. As well as RCTs, inspired by great assessment in a classroom, we don’t see monitoring and evaluation as something that happens once a year during an RCT. We have built M&E into our whole process, whether that’s using data from our mobile app, or continuing to run small testbeds and AB experiments to gather insights and feedback on our work. Working with our existing partners such as Mest, Prevail and IDP has helped us to identify and track the key metrics that help us monitor and evaluate our work.

Our mobile tools enable Teachers, School Leaders, Field Officers to gather data on program engagement, teaching quality, and student learning data to understand what’s working and to continuously improve our approach. Our programs have already supported thousands of teachers across hundreds of schools, helping improve both teacher confidence and student learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy. We are currently one year into a 3-year Randomized Control Trial (RCT) in Ghana to measure the effectiveness of our program on reading levels. We’re excited to share updates of our current findings very soon.

We know that for our interventions to scale to the size of the problem, we need to ensure the unit cost per child and teacher metrics are where they need to be to ensure ease of replication, and adaptability across regions or countries. Often this relies on creative solutions to familiar challenges. We pride ourselves on being relentlessly innovative and collaborative, whether that’s through use of technology or video, or through system design and streamlining of print materials. We’re on this journey with our funding partners and have set some ambitious goals to work towards throughout 2025-26. By next academic year we’ll have scaled our program to 5+ districts across the central region of Ghana, supporting over 40,000 children.

All of our digital tools are designed to work offline, on low-specification handsets. One of our core design principles for all our programs to be enhanced by tech, not reliant on it. Our literacy and numeracy programs have been carefully designed to align to the national teaching standards in both Ghana and Uganda, as well as to the global competency framework. Designing systems and frameworks is another key principle in ensuring work can be adapted to new contexts and geographies. AI is also playing an increasingly key role in the creation, translation and adaptation of materials.

Our programs are designed to reach all teachers and learners, with a deliberate focus on inclusion and gender equity. We work with governments to ensure training materials, coaching, and classroom practices promote equal participation and challenge bias.

Safeguarding is built into our operations - from staff and partner training to clear reporting procedures and child-protection policies - so that everyone involved in our work learns and thrives in a safe, supportive environment.

We have been really encouraged by the support and recognition we’ve received over the last 18-24 months. Currently, our main funding partner in Ghana is the IDP Foundation. In addition to IDP, The Peter Cundill Foundation has been a long-standing partner providing annual funding for our East Africa programs. Recent awards include Mulago Foundation, Global Schools Forum and The Prevail Fund. Previous support and funding partners include The World Bank, The Windfall Trust, Mastercard Foundation, The Jacobs Foundation, Bisconti Family Foundation, Pace Able, and Team4Tech.

If you’d like to support the organisation by making a one-off donation, you can do so by visiting https://inspiringteachers.org/donate.

One-off donations from our community go towards the running of our in-country programs. This could be anything from supporting a teacher to attend training, to provide learning materials as part of our Inspiring Reading and Numeracy program. We thank you in advance for any support you are able to give.

Gift Aid is a government scheme in the UK that allows charities to reclaim the tax that you have already paid on your donations through income tax or capital gains tax.

If you live in the UK and you’re a UK tax payer, then you are eligible to add GiftAid, which enables us to claim back tax you have paid in addition to your donation.

If you live outside the UK or are currently not a UK tax payer, then you will not be eligible to add GiftAid.

Under UK charity law, charities are not permitted to refund donations other than in specific circumstances. If for any reason you have donated in error, please email us at info@inspiringteachers.org. We’re a friendly bunch and we’ll ask you a few questions to determine what’s happened so that we can help in any way that we can. We are committed to the highest standards of legal compliance and we treat all requests for refunds with the utmost importance.

If you’d like to organise an event or set up a funding partnership with us, please email us at info@inspiringteachers.org.