🧰 The Human Side of Systems Change

Reflections from 9 months on the road in 5 countries.

Girls prepare to dance at Saraswati Day (photo by Big Tree Farms Bali).

On May 20 in Bali, I watched kids walk home holding their parents’ hands, dressed in white headdresses and sarongs made of their best batik. For Saraswati day - the day of knowledge - they sang songs and danced Rejang to be blessed for the coming year of school. Balinese pray to gods of the land, sea, animals, air - and on the last day of the 210-day cycle, they pray to education. Families place books at their home’s altar.

The Saraswati ceremony reminded me how around the world, families hope that education will bring better futures for their children. But too often, it doesn’t. Entrenched poverty and inequality persist.

In August 2022, I set out on a journey to understand: how does big change happen in education systems? (By this I mean education reforms and innovation, through government, that reach millions of kids across Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.)

I went to Brazil, worked with Centro Lemann and wrote about Sobral’s reforms, the MST, and Alice Ribeiro, who leads Movimento Pela Base. In India I spent time with Manish Sisodia (leader of Delhi’s reforms), Piramal Foundation, and Central Square (who I wrote about alongside Lemann Foundation and DGMT). I spent three weeks in Pakistan with the activist Baela Jamil and TCF. And in Indonesia, I learned about national reforms led by Minister Nadiem Makarim and GovTech Edu, as well as Tanoto Foundation. I lived in Kenya from 2016-2019 and went back in December as a board member for the network I co-founded, Metis; I’ve written about the history of Kenya’s education system and the edtech landscape, and am writing about the entrepreneur Wawira Njiru.

Through consulting work for Global School Leaders, I also interviewed 42 leading systems change organizations, including Harambee, Education Partnerships Group, Big Win, Mantra4Change, ZiziAfrique, Education Alliance, PAL Network, Fit for Purpose, and STIR (we will share insights from this study in July).

There is still so much left to process. But as I sat in the Jakarta airport to board a flight to the US, I started to think about what I learned from this journey. (I’ll pause travel for the summer before heading to Colombia, Nigeria, and back to Kenya.)

I’m starting to develop a theory. For systems change to happen, perhaps four factors are important to have in our toolbox.

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TEST

What models WORK to strengthen teaching and learning?

This is the easiest part - teaching methods, lesson plans, curriculum, books, software, funding mechanisms, national policies, etc. There is a LOT of research and evidence on this and so many excellent organizations to learn from. See the many studies produced by entities like J-PAL, GEEAP, and thousands of implementing organizations who do their own M&E to test and share the impact of their work (schools, policymakers, nonprofits, edtech companies, etc). We actually know a lot about what kinds of schools change life trajectories for kids - and how to train teachers to create those environments, at small scale.

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SCALE

How do organizations, governments and funders partner so that effective models GROW to reach millions more children?

Too often pilots show beautiful impact, but they struggle or die in the journey to scale. Less research on this, but a few good resources are the RISE outputs and Brookings tools for scale. My field visits showed me that there are many pathways/routes for how systems change can happen:

• Coalition backed by a wealthy philanthropist: Movimento pela Base

• New political party decides to prioritize education: AAP/Sisodia

• Collective impact facilitates leaders across education and health in a district to coordinate/strengthen their work: Piramal Foundation

• Grassroots movement creates new learning models and shapes national policy: MST

• Nonprofit partners with government schools: Food4Education/Wawira Njiru

• Activist collects data to expose the learning crisis and uses it to advocate and shape government priorities: ITA/Baela Jamil

• Minister creates a new entity to support government adoption of edtech such as an app for government teachers: Nadiem Makarim and GovTech Edu

• Local foundations seed a testbed of models and shape government policy: Central Square, Lemann, Tanoto

• Local experts train and coach organizations to help them partner with government: Fit for Purpose

A lot of my work (and Oxford thesis) was to capture the steps in these processes. But this is still pretty technical. We don’t know enough about what makes these happen in some environments and not others. So let’s move a level deeper.

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WINDOWS

History changes the landscape. Suddenly, reforms and innovation are easier. Academics call these windows of opportunity. Politics, economics, culture, and other forces shape these windows, and often they are beyond any individual’s control.

How do we take advantage of opportunities when they come and persist when they are closed? How do we use advocacy and collective action to build and shift the FIELD - so that a window favorable to our goal becomes more likely?

We need to better understand how to do this, and it can’t be captured by an RCT or quantitative data.

I haven’t seen any books on this in the education sector in Global South countries (if you know of any, please share!) But in other sectors, stories captured systems change efforts that took decades (on the movement to end slavery, civil rights movement, California farm workers movement, movement for AIDS treatment, Black Panthers, and women’s liberation movement). These are models for the kinds of stories I want to tell in my book.

On my trip, I witnessed so many examples of how history and politics shape windows to open or close:

• Two weeks after I said goodbye to Sisodia’s team, he was arrested on what are likely politically motivated charges. He is still in jail and is a pawn in the ruling party’s quest to weaken opposition parties in India alongside the arrest of Rahul Gandhi and others. Meanwhile, Sisodia’s wife has MS.

• Inflation in Pakistan is at a 50-year high (an unbelievable 36.4%!) and this reduces government education budgets, parents’ capacity to pay school fees, and education organizations’ ability to pay salaries.

• Minister positions in Indonesia are often used as a tool to reward political allies, so President Widodo took a bold risk to prioritize education and appoint technocrat Nadiem Makarim as Minister in 2019; to join government, Makarim resigned as CEO of Indonesia’s first startup valued at over $10 billion. A 2024 presidential election will likely change Indonesia’s Minister of Education, so Minister Makarim is under a tight timeline with only 4 years to advance reforms. He also faces a tricky process of leading a national Ministry in a country where most power over schools lies with regencies (similar to a district or county - there are over 500 in Indonesia), due to decentralization after dictatorship ended in 1998.

• When I first met Wawira Njiru in 2016, her organization Food4Education was fundraising small amounts through table cards at Nairobi restaurants. Last year, she was awarded $4 million from Mackenzie Scott (who became a billionaire through Amazon’s rise). Njiru now partners with Mombasa and Murang’a counties to feed 140,000 children a day through Africa’s largest school feeding program! Her team brought Nairobi’s Deputy Governor to India last year to learn and President Ruto (elected in September) has school feeding as a key priority in his party’s manifesto.

• I joined crowded street celebrations in São Paulo in October, when Lula was elected President. While Movimento pela Base and Lemann Foundation partner Todos pela Educação faced challenges during Rousseff’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s presidency, under Lula they suddenly have willing partners and champions in government. Camilo Santana and Izolda Cela (former Governors of Ceará state, which has education reforms that Lemann Foundation is supporting to spread) were appointed Minister of Education and Executive Secretary - the top two positions in Brazil’s Ministry of Education.

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HUMANS

At the heart of all these reforms and innovation, and the grand forces of history and politics, there are leaders - who are just complex, flawed people like we all are.

How are they affected by the roller coaster of life - finding a life partner, having children and aging parents, deaths of loved ones? How do they gain and lose motivation as they face OBSTACLE after obstacle - getting arrested, racism from funders, resistance from corrupt leaders in power, struggles with their co-founders, board and team, disappointment after mistakes, streets blocked by protests - and on, and on, and on?

While most experts, funders, and academics focus on the first two (Test and Scale), few focus on the last two (Windows and Humans). But when I think about the leaders I’ve met - and my friends, and my own life - isn’t it the last two that shape our impact the most?

What brings leaders energy, joy, and peace to sustain them through hard times?

How do we hold onto faith and hope when so many forces are against us? Have patience that, as MLK insisted, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” - even when it is hard to see the light?

It seems to me that if we can find more of these answers, we can equip leaders with the tools and support they need to lead systems change. I’m starting to think maybe these answers come less from education, and more from spirituality and other areas of wisdom. And maybe finding the answers is a lifelong process.

What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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🌍 This is part of my journey to write a book about systems change leaders in the Global South's education bright spots (Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Indonesia). For more stories from this trip, sign up for my newsletter (edwell.substack.com) and follow me on LinkedIn. 🌏