United World Schools: Scaling Impact Through Strategic Government Partnerships

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 A transformative educational movement occurs in remote villages across Cambodia, Nepal, Myanmar, and Madagascar. United World Schools (UWS), founded in 2008 with a mission to achieve “Zero Education Poverty,” has established a proven model for delivering quality education to some of the world’s most marginalized communities.

Zero Education Poverty – ensuring every child has attained minimum proficiency in foundational literacy and numeracy to unlock their future potential.

Building the Foundation

UWS began by addressing a fundamental challenge: millions of children in remote areas simply had no access to education. Over the past 16 years, UWS has built an impressive track record, establishing over 320 community-led schools and transforming the lives of over 70,000 children across four countries.

UWS believes in building capacity, not dependency. Its locally led, need-driven approach ensures holistic quality education for rural and marginalized communities, with long-term sustainable impact at the heart of everything it does.

From Access to Quality: A New Challenge

While UWS continues to build schools in areas with severe access constraints, they’ve identified an even more significant challenge: across the globe, there are more non-learners in school than out, with hundreds of millions of children unable to acquire even basic literacy and numeracy skills.

In Cambodia, 90% of children face “learning poverty,” meaning they cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10. Similar statistics exist in Nepal (86%), Myanmar (89%), and Madagascar (94%). As a result of COVID-19, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries.

Simply getting children into school is no longer enough. UWS is committed to ensuring that every child who enters the classroom leaves with the skills they need to succeed.

A Three-Pronged Strategy for National Impact

UWS’s work is now being recognized nationally in Cambodia and Nepal, where it plays a key role in delivering respective Education Sector Plans. This recognition places UWS in a unique position to drive ambitious and sustainable change with the endorsement of national governments.

To achieve their vision of Zero Education Poverty, UWS has developed a three-pronged approach:

  1. Building Schools in Remote Areas: Continuing their tried and tested model of establishing schools in areas with severe access constraints.
  2. Working with Local Government Schools: Expanding work with local governments to improve education quality in existing government schools, with projects currently underway in Nepal and set to begin in Cambodia this year.
  3. National-Level Collaboration to Strengthen Systems: Leveraging their established network with government authorities and local municipalities to enable national governments in Nepal and Cambodia to absorb the learnings from the UWS model.

The Government Partnership Model

In areas with good access to government schools but poor provision of quality education, UWS intervenes to address foundational learning gaps. Their partnership model focuses on two core pillars:

Teacher Training: Equipping government school teachers with evidence-based methods to improve foundational literacy and numeracy through structured pedagogy, gender-transformative practices, and inclusive education techniques.

Community Engagement: Mobilizing school management committees, mothers’ groups, and girls’ clubs to foster supportive learning environments and drive cultural change to promote attendance, retention, and inclusivity.

With these partnerships, UWS aims to triple literacy and numeracy attainment in participating schools within three years and sustain it beyond their exit.

From Thousands to Millions

The impact of UWS’s new strategy could be transformative. With their credibility at the national level, they are positioned to reach not just thousands but millions of children. UWS is actively running pilot programs in Nepal and is set to begin in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province, where they started working in 2008, to test and refine their approaches for national scaling.

For UWS, success means achieving three critical outcomes:

Quality: Every child is empowered to achieve foundational literacy and numeracy

Sustainability: Education systems strengthened to sustain quality education for future generations

Scale: Access to quality education accelerated for children in marginalized communities

Why This Matters for Business

For BAB Accelerate members looking toward emerging markets, UWS’s work addresses a critical challenge. Today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce, and foundational skills like literacy and numeracy form the bedrock of all future learning and economic participation.

UWS does more than teach children to read and write. It also develops future innovators, entrepreneurs, and community leaders. Partnering with governments helps create more resilient education systems that can adapt to the challenges of the 21st-century economy.

Getting Involved

As UWS expands its government partnerships, it’s seeking strategic collaborations with businesses and organizations that share its vision of quality education for all. The organization cannot achieve this ambitious scaling alone and is actively seeking funders and implementing partners to make its vision a reality.

For BAB Accelerate members interested in corporate social responsibility initiatives with measurable impact, UWS offers compelling partnership opportunities through financial support, skills-based volunteering, or strategic advisory roles.

To learn more about UWS USA and its transformative work in education, visit www.uwsusaglobal.net or contact their US Executive Director at francesca.lanning@uwsglobal.net.