When 8-year-old Gloria arrived at her first day of a Building Tomorrow “Roots to Rise” literacy camp in Iganga District, Uganda, she was (like over 90 percent of her Ugandan peers) struggling to master the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Over the course of a few weeks, guided by a community volunteer, Gloria began sounding out words, forming sentences, and even comprehending short paragraphs. More than that: She was learning to be joyful again. Gloria found herself not only helping her classmates but dreaming of becoming a teacher herself.

Today, across sub-Saharan Africa, nearly nine out of 10 children cannot read or write a simple text by age 10, a condition the World Bank terms "learning poverty." The obstacles to reversing this are substantial. The region already faces a shortfall of nearly 15 million teachers, declining education spending as a share of GDP, and deepening post-COVID learning gaps, but the crisis has been further intensified by the recent cancellation of 99 percent of USAID’s global commitments to basic education, amounting to an estimated $1 billion in cuts. In low- and middle-income countries, these cuts come as ministries are already stretching limited budgets across multiple urgent sectors, often against the backdrop of double-digit percentage losses in bilateral aid revenue.

Gloria represents not only the potential of more than 600 million learners worldwide who lack foundational learning skills, but her progress was the result of a promising but underutilized approach for delivering education, a community-led and volunteer-based model that could be the key to solving the global education crisis.

The Power of Proximity in Community-Led Education Efforts

To date, more than 900,000 Ugandan children like Gloria have participated in Roots to Rise camps, guided by a grassroots network of over 20,000 Community Education Volunteers. Trained through decentralized models and rooted in local communities, these volunteers demonstrate what other sectors, such as health and livelihoods, have already taught social impact practitioners: proximity and purpose can deliver powerful results. As a scalable, sustainable solution, community-powered education models offer a compelling answer to the intertwined crises of student academic underperformance and the ever-widening teacher shortages in LMICs.

Read the full article about community-led education by George Srour, Joseph Kaliisa, Grace Musiimire, and Luke Tyburski at Stanford Social Innovation Review.