Gates-backed Elimu-Soko opens $150,000 funding call for classroom innovations across Africa

The Teaching Innovation Lab (TIL), led by education innovation firm Elimu-Soko with support from the Gates Foundation, has opened a funding call inviting innovators to design and test low-cost, scalable solutions to improve foundational literacy teaching in African public schools. 

The programme is offering grants of up to $150,000 for organisations operating in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, and Mozambique. 

Selected pilots will run for six to 12 months and are expected to reach at least 200 teachers, with larger cohorts encouraged to enable comparative testing on cost, scalability, and effectiveness.

Elimu-Soko said that many of the most effective teacher professional development (TPD) programmes across Africa remain heavily dependent on donor funding and are often too costly for governments to sustain over the long term. 

This reliance on external funding has left many education systems unable to scale effective teacher training, creating gaps in classroom support and limiting improvements in student learning. Without sustainable models, proven interventions often remain at the pilot stage, and teachers frequently lack the consistent guidance, coaching, and resources needed to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes.

“Most successful TPD programmes have been funded by external donors at costs that exceed what governments can sustain,” the organisation said, adding that education systems are often forced to trade off programme reach for quality.

For African founders and innovators, the funding could offer capital and an opportunity to test whether classroom-level innovations can improve learning outcomes at scale while remaining affordable for public schools. 

According to Elimu-Soko, the Teaching Innovation Lab is designed to test whether innovation can shift that balance.  

“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.

The funding call is anchored on evidence that teacher quality is the most important school-based factor affecting student learning outcomes. Research from low- and middle-income countries suggests that structured pedagogy programmes—combining detailed lesson plans, quality materials, and continuous coaching—deliver some of the strongest learning gains in education interventions.

Kenya’s Tusome literacy programme, which reached about 7 million learners across nearly 24,000 primary schools, recorded large improvements in reading outcomes, while a global meta-analysis found that instructional coaching improves teaching quality and sustains those gains over time.

Despite this evidence, Elimu-Soko said many African education systems continue to struggle with limited daily instructional support for teachers, weak coaching capacity, fragmented professional development structures, and poor use of classroom data. 

The Teaching Innovation Lab aims to address these gaps by testing solutions that strengthen existing teacher development systems for foundational literacy and numeracy.

“We seek solutions that strengthen existing TPD structures within government education systems while remaining financially viable at scale,” the organisation said.

Applicants are expected to propose pilots that clearly define the classroom problem being addressed, explain how the intervention is expected to improve teaching or learning outcomes, outline implementation and measurement plans, and demonstrate a credible pathway for integration into government systems. 

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.