Since launching our strategy in late 2023, we’ve been working hard to centre impact on children in our work.  Pausing to take stock, this year we asked: What is driving the greatest impact for children?  Where do we need to sharpen our focus?  And how can we better understand what’s working?

In answering these questions, we discovered some key barriers to our own effectiveness.  This pushed us to revisit aspects of our strategy to ensure it’s as clear as possible, and to consider how we work with our partners to evidence and understand change.

Going back to basics

The pillars of our strategy are strong – we know we are funding the right things, in the right places.  Our commitment to primary school education, and foundational literacy and numeracy in particular, remains our core purpose.  Our existing commitments to our partners also remain unchanged.  But the nuts and bolts of how we bring about life-changing learning for children in India and South Africa needed tightening.

In revisiting our strategy, two issues stood out. Firstly, children weren’t visible enough.  Jargon and unnecessary complexity was obscuring how our funding translates into impact in their lives. Secondly, five goals felt like too many, creating multiple layers that made it difficult to focus on what matters most – improving outcomes for children.

How we measure impact also didn’t stack up.  While we collect rich data and evidence, the way we do it makes it difficult to draw comparisons and insights across our portfolio.  We needed a better way to build a fuller picture of where change is really happening.

Making the grade

Over the course of this year, we’ve interrogated, recreated and refined.  Our strategy has been fine-tuned with a single purpose in mind: providing greater clarity.  A new impact measurement framework focused on the evidence that matters will help us better understand change, while reducing unnecessary reporting for our partners.

Some of the changes you can expect to see from these developments include:

• Children clearly centred in our work: A sharper vision and mission now unmistakably outline our intention to transform learning for every child. A streamlined goal – reducing five goals down to just one – focuses on children’s foundational learning.
• A revised theory of change (ToC) sets out change across three interconnected levels: the child, the learning environment, and the education system. New funding streams have been designed to support partners at different stages, working in different ways.
• A new measurement framework enables deeper understanding of how our funding creates impact for children. By streamlining the data we collect, we hope to develop focused insights into the unique challenges and opportunities that exist for children participating in our partner programmes.
• Revised values – now our guiding ‘principles’ – that ground us in action and keep us on track to champion every child.
• Clearer, simplified language around what we fund, how we fund, and why.
• Evolving funding models to support work across our new funding streams and widen access to our resources, including testing new approaches such as open calls.

These changes are designed to provide a clear path connecting our work to measurable change, and to give us the evidence we need to inform strategic decision making.  Essentially, they’ll help us become a more effective funder.

Explore our revised vision, mission, theory of change and principles, or discover our updated goal for this strategic period.  

“Making sure the strategy that sits at the heart of our approach is working well, and we have the right tools and mechanisms in place to measure our impact, is key to ensuring our resources achieve as much as they can for children.”

Luke Aspinall, CEO

Changes at a glance:

Next steps:

Support for existing grants: Though current partner grants remain unchanged, we will be in touch with existing partners individually to ensure a smooth transition to our new measurement framework, which may require some adjustments to objectives.

New ways to access Maitri funding: We want our funding to be as accessible as possible, and to create opportunities for change across all of our focus areas. We will share more information in the coming months on funding opportunities for new grantees, including an open call launching in South Africa in 2026.