Building Tomorrow: adapting global best practices in a community education programme in rural Uganda

• In Event: Bridging the evidence gap: from global demands to local realities

Proposal

In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly nine in 10 children are unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10, and an estimated 202 million primary and lower secondary school-aged children cannot read, write, or perform basic mathematics (UNESCO, 2023; World Bank, 2023). In Uganda, the challenge is particularly acute: more than 83% of primary-aged learners—approximately 7.3 million children—lack foundational skills in literacy and numeracy (World Bank, 2019).

Building Tomorrow works to address this crisis by contextualizing global evidence on “what works” to the realities of rural Uganda. Our flagship program, Roots to Rise, is inspired by Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) and integrates Universal Design for Learning, social-emotional learning, as well as elements of structured pedagogy. Building Tomorrow uses Community Education Teams, in-depth training, and ongoing monitoring and support to ensure those closest to learners deliver high quality programming.

Through Community Education Teams, the program has reached more than 800,000 learners, with nearly 90% improving their skills a level or more and nearly two-thirds reaching minimum proficiency level for their grade. A 2024 difference-in-differences analysis shows that learners in Roots to Rise camps experience 20 times greater learning gains within an academic term than peers who do not participate.

A core feature of Building Tomorrow’s model is the inclusion of Community Education Volunteers (CEVs)—local, unpaid community members. Their contribution reflects an intentional effort to ground programs in the community itself. Evidence supports the efficacy of these community members in delivering quality programming; a randomized controlled trial by Youth Impact (NBER, 2023) demonstrated that CEVs can generate learning gains equivalent to more than one year of high-quality instruction in just 160 minutes of individualized lessons. Through innovations such as CEVs, Building Tomorrow has been able to scale these results across Uganda, quadrupling its cumulative reach since 2022.

Building Tomorrow intentionally creates environments where technical experts and local staff work together on research teams. These projects are also informed by community voice through focus groups or key informant interviews. This approach helps ensure our evidence is credible and rigorous, while also being grounded in the local reality. One example of this is Building Tomorrow's partnership with the University of Notre Dame through the Graduating from Learning Poverty project.

A forthcoming 2023 randomized controlled trial (Brooks et al.) provides further validation of this approach, finding that learners in schools supported by Building Tomorrow Fellows made 41% more progress in numeracy, received 79% more instructional time, and were 30% less likely to regress than learners in control schools.

On this panel, Building Tomorrow will share insights from navigating these dynamics: how we adapt global best practices to rural Uganda, how we build community ownership into evidence-driven interventions, and how we equip our teams to engage funders and policymakers with confidence. By embodying an ethos of continuous learning, Building Tomorrow seeks to contribute to the broader discussion on how global evidence standards and local realities can be brought into closer alignment to drive sustainable improvements in education systems.

Author

• George Srour, Building Tomorrow, Inc.