Sustainability in Edtech NGOs: Effective Cross-National Partnerships for Long-term Impact

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Designed for equity: implementation and efficacy of educational access platforms, policy, and practice

Proposal

Team4Tech is a non-profit that connects corporate volunteers and grants with NGOs seeking greater access to technology and equity operating at a local level around the world. They first give NGO partners an evaluative survey to determine the NGO partners’ needs and goals, and through this survey, match corporate resources and train volunteers for localized needs. Over the last five years, Team4Tech has “created $7.5M in donated services and grants using only $2.3M in operating expenses,” (Team4Tech Impact Report, 2017) a multiplier of 3.32 for every dollar spent. We will dive into this figure and ask: what does this multiplier mean for Team4Tech’s individual NGO partners in context? What is the efficacy of the survey techniques, training practices, and eventual curriculum delivery in creating sustainable learning outcomes? With qualitative and quantitative survey data for both their corporate partners and NGO clients, we will conduct a mixed methods study to find which inputs resulted in the most sustainable impacts.


By utilizing this unique, cross national source of data, we hope to identify how to best lower barriers in accessing quality education with Team4Tech’s partners and apply those lessons to global educational access projects. With a mixed methods study, we hope to quantify inputs and outputs, then use survey answers and individual cases to contextualize impact in a local setting. Ultimately, we hope to find if certain organizational techniques, trainings and resource allocation methods lead to greater success for agents hoping to contribute to edtech missions around the world.

Authors

• Mingwei Ma, Stanford University

• William Mock, Stanford University