Learning Poverty
Although great progress has been made in the last two decades in ensuring access to education for both boys and girls, far too many children go to school without ever gaining the reading and writing skills that form the basis of all subsequent learning.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 90 per cent of children in the world's poorest countries were unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. This is defined as ‘learning poverty’.
To fight learning poverty, by the end of 2030, we will reach 1 million children with educational efforts that accelerate basic reading, writing and numeracy skills.
The Hempel Foundation's new education strategy follows three courses of action to achieve our goals:
- Developing and delivering cost-efficient and scalable learning interventions with a proven potential for impact at scale.
- Unleashing the potential of EdTech supporting delivery of quality education, through high-risk / high-reward philanthropic investments.
- Catalysing collaboration, knowledge-sharing and awareness-raising that can mobilize and sustain efforts to combat learning poverty.
Why education?
Education is a key to tackling poverty and thus also health, gender equality and a controlled population development.
