Jacobs Foundation

Three decades of work in child and youth development have shown us that learning systems and institutions around the world often fail to nurture children’s learning potential and support them in fulfilling their aspirations. This is why, over the next ten years, we are increasing our ambition and are committing 500 million Swiss francs to co-create evidence-based ideas for learning, to support schools in offering quality education and sharing best practices, and to transform education systems around the world. Our aim is to enable learning systems in diverse contexts to provide children and youth with effective knowledge, skills, attitudes, tools, and equitable opportunities to reach their full learning potential and thrive together. Our work is structured around the core focus of understanding and embracing variability in learning during the early years (ages 2-12) and early transitions. Our approach is designed to connect evidence to action to systems across diverse contexts. We will build on our core competences: Evidence Generator and Translator: Fund research excellence to promote the generation and practical use of evidence on human learning and development with impact on policy and practice. Partnership Innovator: Ignite multi-stakeholder coalitions between governments, industry, schools, and social purpose organizations to leverage resources and increase the capacity to jointly scale up effective education policies and practices. Policy Entrepreneur: Support policy innovation by facilitating access to knowledge, data, and tools, to promote learning and practice improvement, instigate change processes, and inspire leadership to strengthen the entire system. We are committed to be a leading learning foundation that embraces a culture of learning and sharing to inspire systems change transformation.