Something important is happening in classrooms around the world. In a growing number of countries, governments are improving foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes for millions of children, at scale, through their own public systems.

This is good news: stronger foundational learning builds cognitive skills and, over time, the capabilities young people need for jobs. These are not small pilots or short-term projects. They are sustained, government-led reforms, and the evidence of their impact is growing.

As members of the Global Coalition for Foundational Learning, we have spent the past year deliberately refreshing the set of reform stories we share with governments and partners. The older examples remain powerful. But the map of credible evidence is expanding, and it deserves to be told.

A new generation of reform stories

A growing set of recent reforms is expanding the map of credible evidence well beyond the historical cases that have long dominated this conversation.

In Uttar Pradesh, India, the NIPUN Bharat mission covers over 110,000 schools and nearly 3.7 million early grade students with stronger classroom instruction, teaching-learning materials, assessments and community engagement. ASER 2024 reports that the state's Grade 3 proficiency in Hindi rose by nearly 16 percentage points between 2018 and 2024, with mathematics improving by over 20 points. Uttar Pradesh, historically one of India's lowest-performing states, now ranks in the top 10 nationally on both measures, corroborated by multiple independent data sources.

In the Western Cape, South Africa, a government-funded structured pedagogy program has driven the highest Grade 3 systemic results ever recorded in the province. The mathematics pass rate rose from 44% in 2021 to 62% in 2025; literacy from 37% to 51%, both exceeding pre-pandemic levels, measured through independently administered census assessments of over 91,000 learners. These gains reflect what a government system, investing consistently in its own teachers and classrooms, can achieve.

In Senegal, a different model is demonstrating impact at the program level. The Ndaw Wune program, meaning 'Success for All', targets struggling Grade 1 and 2 students with remedial instruction in national languages, delivered after school by trained public school teachers. A rigorous independent evaluation conducted by the American Institutes for Research in 2024–25 found significant positive impacts on decoding skills, oral reading fluency and reading comprehension.

In Morocco, the government's Pioneer Schools program combines explicit teaching and a Teaching at the Right Level approach to address learning gaps in Arabic, French, and mathematics. An independent academic analysis drawing on four separate evaluations of the program's experimental phase found an average effect size of 0.90 standard deviations after just one year, placing it among the most effective educational interventions documented in low- and middle-income countries. The program has since expanded significantly, with the government reporting continued gains. Challenges around teacher training capacity and funding at full national scale remain, but the early evidence is compelling.

What these reforms have in common, and why it matters

These reforms span varying income levels, regions, languages, and institutional starting points. A state of 200 million people in India. A province in post-pandemic South Africa. A remedial program in Senegal delivered in Wolof and Pulaar. They do not point to a single blueprint. But they share a set of conditions that appear, again and again, in systems that are genuinely improving.

The first is sustained political ownership. Every one of these reforms involved leaders, at national, state, or provincial level, who treated foundational learning not as one priority among many but as a named, visible commitment, with their own credibility attached to it. That political salience created the conditions for everything else: protected budgets, aligned bureaucracies, and the ability to maintain commitment across years rather than electoral cycles.

The second is a coherent, non-negotiable instructional core. None of these systems succeeded by doing many things simultaneously. Each identified a tight package of what structured pedagogy, well-supported teachers, and simple high-frequency assessment look like in their context, and then protected that package from the fragmentation and scope creep that tends to dilute reform over time. The non-negotiables were non-negotiable.

The third is data that was close to the classroom and connected to decisions. Not just national assessments that arrive two years after the fact, but frequent, simple tools that allowed teachers, mentors, and district officials to see whether children were learning and to adjust. This kind of real-time feedback loop, seen in a phone app in Uttar Pradesh as much as in an independent census assessment in the Western Cape, is consistently present in systems that improve and absent in those that don't.

What these reforms do not share is a single model of delivery. Some were nationally mandated; others were subnational. Some used contracted implementation partners; others built entirely within government structures. Some prioritized mother-tongue instruction; others worked within existing language-of-instruction policies. This diversity is not a weakness in the evidence base. It is the point.

This has a direct implication for how the Coalition and its partners work with governments. The question is not 'which model should we replicate?' It is 'which combination of these ingredients is missing in your system, and how can we help you put it in place?'

None of this is separate from the skills and jobs agenda that governments and development partners are increasingly focused on. It is the foundation of it. A child who cannot read with fluency and understanding by age 10 cannot later acquire the technical, digital, or transferable skills that modern labor markets demand.

This matters for how governments frame their investment decisions. The countries making the greatest strides on foundational learning are not doing so at the expense of their jobs and growth priorities. They are doing so precisely because of them.

When a Minister of Finance asks what the highest-return education investment available to their country is, the answer from the evidence is consistent: it starts here, in the early grades, with children learning to read and calculate well.

The unfinished agenda

We do know more than we did. The core package of structured pedagogy, well-supported teachers, and credible learning assessment has a strong and growing evidence base. But the systems challenge, how to sustain reforms across political cycles and protect core components through budget pressures, remains genuinely hard.

And there are equity gaps that headline numbers do not always capture: girls who have already dropped out, children with disabilities, those learning in a second or third language, the 'forgotten middle' that is not always reached by the first wave of reform gains. Governments and partners need to be honest about this.

The Global Coalition for Foundational Learning exists because fragmented external support is itself a barrier governments face. Our role is not to replace government leadership. It is to make aligned, evidence-informed support easier to access: coordinating technical assistance and financing behind government-owned plans, reducing transaction costs, and connecting leaders across contexts so that a minister navigating a politically difficult reform can learn from a peer who has been there.

The economic case for doing this well is compelling. New analysis projects that universal foundational learning could increase global GDP by $196 trillion over 20 years and avert 12 million child deaths. These are not advocacy numbers. They are the argument for treating foundational learning as the national economic and social priority it deserves to be.

In July 2026, governments and partners from across Africa will gather in Lilongwe for the Africa Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX 2026), under the theme 'From Commitments to Results.' The reforms described in this blog are exactly the evidence that should be at the center of that conversation.

They also reflect a growing continental effort to understand and share what works, as documented in new analysis mapping foundational learning exemplars across Africa published by the African Union and UNICEF. The question now is whether political will, financing, and implementation discipline can align quickly enough, and sustain long enough, to turn a growing set of examples into a genuine global shift. We believe they can.

About foundational learning

Foundational learning refers to the essential literacy and numeracy skills, as well as broader transferable competencies, that all children need to master in the early grades as the basis for all future learning.

About the Global Coalition for Foundational Learning

The Global Coalition for Foundational Learning brings together the World Bank, Gates Foundation, UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, and GPE to support and amplify government-led efforts to scale effective foundational learning interventions. The Coalition works to reduce fragmentation across partners, strengthen the evidence base, and connect governments with the aligned, practical support they need to deliver reform at scale.