What do international education charities do?

Charities run a large variety of education programs in the developing world. None of the these programs have been shown to reliably improve student performance (or life outcomes) over the long term.1

• School building (more): Charities build classrooms or buildings for government-run schools, and build and run schools themselves.
• Scholarships (more): Charities sponsor individual students and fund schools so that students do not have to pay the school fees that are common in the developing world.
• Teacher training: Charities train new teachers and upgrade the skills of established teachers.
• Pre-primary schools: Charities run schools for children ages 3-6 to prepare them for primary school.
• Textbooks and supplies (more): Charities provide everything from pencils to chalkboards to uniforms and shoes.
• Computers (more): Charities fund computer classrooms in schools and provide out-of-school computer training classes.
• Libraries: Charities build school- and community-based libraries.

What are the challenges to finding a great education charity in the developing world?

Increasing attendance and test scores is difficult. And even if a charity manages to get more children to school and to teach them to read and do math, the students' lives may not be much better than they would have been otherwise. Because skills learned in school may not help children living in the developing world to one day earn more money or live better lives as adults, it is extremely difficult for an education charity to show that its programs are making a significant difference in peoples lives. Here are some of the challenges they face:

• The value of raising school attendance is questionable given evidence about the poor quality of school systems in the developing world. Teachers may be overworked, frequently absent, or abusive, and schools may be geared towards elite students.2

• Education outcomes are hard to measure because test scores do not fully capture the results of a program and many of the relevant outcomes may not be apparent until years later.
• It is not clear that students benefit in adulthood from what they learned in school.3

Where should you donate to improve developing world education?

We have not yet identified a developing-world education charity that we can confidently recommend. However, you may want to consider:

• Pratham, an India-based education charity, which has shown an unusual commitment to rigorously evaluating its programming and generating better knowledge about what works. (For more, see our brief review of Pratham.)

For more information, see the full list of international education charities that we have considered.

1. 1. See our discussion of the evidence for developing-world education programs.

2. 2.

   See our discussion of improving school attendance.

   Also see our discussion of school quality in the developing world on our blog.

3. 3.

   See our discussion of education and life outcomes.