Giving Compass' Take:

• The MacArthur Foundation joined with various donors to create the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education and is working towards providing educational opportunities to populations that would otherwise lack access to them. 

• How are funding collaboratives effective? How do they compare to traditional funding mechanisms? 

• Read about Stanford Social Innovation Review's examination of funding collaboratives before and after the 2016 election. 

Millions of children globally are struggling to obtain meaningful education due to limited access to schools, poor quality of teaching, and lack of relevance between curricula and labor market needs. In 2011, MacArthur joined with several other donors to found the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE), a collaborative that seeks to increase secondary education access and improve learning outcomes for marginalized populations.

The partnership supports the development and testing of innovative models to address barriers to participation and achievement in secondary education, facilitates the scale-up of effective interventions through systematic change in target countries, and promotes efforts to build evidence regarding what works in secondary education.

How did the PSIPSE come to be? Why was it formed?
Kristen Molyneaux: The PSIPSE arose out of a shared desire among the founding donors to source and support innovative programs focused on improving secondary-level education in the developing world, an area that is often under-resourced and overlooked in the education field.

What have been some key learnings from working as a donor collaborative?
Kim Kerr: Those involved in the PSIPSE realized early on that there are a large number of organizations working to overcome challenges in secondary education at the country level, but few opportunities for those organizations to come together. PSIPSE's collaborative approach allowed us to reach and support a very broad range of these organizations and to bring them together to share best practices and innovative models.

What have been some outcomes of the collaborative? 
Kristen Molyneaux: One particularly interesting outcome has been our ability to draw learnings from a large and diverse portfolio of grantee organizations. Reports produced by Mathematica Policy Research provide helpful overviews of our work. Several findings have been valuable in directing how we approach our grantmaking

Read the full article about education funding collaboratives by Kim Kerr, Kristen Molyneaux, and Dana Schmidt at MacArthur Foundation