At Imaginable Futures, we embrace a systems-based approach to effectively help solve complex educational problems, champion innovation, and ensure every learner has the opportunity to achieve a brigh…
Imaginable Futures—a venture of The Omidyar Group—and Lumina Foundation, along with a group of leading partner organizations, today launched the Rise Prize, awarding $1 million in combined prizes to …
Last October, 10 tornadoes ripped through the Dallas area within a single week. The costliest cyclone event in Texas history, it left $2 billion in damages and thousands of displaced people in its wa…
Launches with $200 million of capital invested and $150 million from philanthropists Pierre and Pam Omidyar. Will focus on the future of learning across US, Africa and Latin America.
We’re thrilled to share that after seven years as Omidyar Network’s Education initiative, today we launch as Imaginable Futures, an independent global philanthropic investment firm focused on the fut…
While an increasingly interconnected and digital world is full of new opportunities, taking advantage of those prospects requires the right conditions, which aren’t always available to people. Labora…
Despite the growing need, the dream of building new opportunities for young learners can be a challenge. Qualified leaders face hurdles in many different areas, just to be able to open up their doors.
SPARK Schools is an independent network of affordable private schools in South Africa offering globally competitive education. Its blended learning model combines traditional classroom teaching with …
Education is supposed to prepare children for the future, yet the current system is 100 years behind the times.
A group of 10 funders today announced a new collaborative, Home Grown, to improve home-based child care in the United States. Home Grown will increase access to and the quality of home-based child ca…
If you’re a parent of a young child, searching for the perfect fit for child care can often be a struggle.
Through guided play and exploration at Ms. Kelly’s family child care program, Nevaeh builds math, literacy, and social emotional skills in a nurturing, educational environment.
In most parts of Asia, smartphones are king. They’re the sole mode of communication for millions of Indonesians, connecting remote island dwellers to the outside world, and the de facto wallet for Ch…
The Brookings Institute estimates that it will take 100 years for the world’s poor children to reach the same education levels as the wealthy at today’s pace. It’s a daunting statistic.
Nearly two years ago, our team at Omidyar Network Education invested in Holberton School. At the time, Holberton had a single campus in San Francisco. We were excited by their innovative approach to …
More than 800 million children and young people will lack the basic skills or qualifications needed for the modern workforce. Disruption is needed to address this challenge, and the answer can’t be m…
Teachers are the single most important factor in improving student achievement. That’s why, while most education innovation is geared toward students — helping them learn, study, or gain access to on…
In 2018, Omidyar Network’s Education initiative, in partnership with Lean Data, conducted a 12-week “Sprint” to collect customer feedback and impact data across our global portfolio.
Jessica and I are both parents of young children, and as we go into each day, we do our best to listen to our kids to help guide them to learn and grow. What they are thinking, how they are feeling, …
I recently visited Bright Beginnings, an early childhood and family learning center in Washington, D.C. Even the fact that they call themselves a “family learning center” speaks to their emphasis on …
In countries around the world, technology is playing an increasingly important role in education systems, schools, and at home. For instance, in Chile, teachers are trying out tablet-based software t…
There are 250 million learners around the world who have finished their schooling – yet aren’t able to read or write well and lack the skills they will need to succeed in the 21st century. The Brooki…
With excitement, we share our new report, Scaling Access & Impact: Realizing the Power of EdTech, one of the most ambitious deep dives to date into the world of education technology (EdTech).
Isabelle Hau, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley (where I originally met her more than a decade ago), now serves as the investment partner for US Education at Omidyar Network. She joined me…
Omidyar Network, in partnership with Sesame Workshop and Promise Venture Studio, hosted Early Futures, a first-of-its-kind event focused on early childhood development. For two action-packed days in …
More than 22 million young people in Latin America and the Caribbean neither work nor study. That number is slightly higher than the population of Chile, and two and a half times as many people as li…
Earlier this month, Omidyar Network released a report called Big Ideas, Little Learners highlighting the mega trends and impactful innovations that we see changing the way our youngest members of soc…
Since we started investing in education across Latin America in 2015, we have been primarily focused on companies that are developing innovative classroom technology that supports individual, persona…
There is no question that the past 50 years have seen major progress in practices for young children and families. In addition, tremendous breakthroughs in brain science have clearly established why …
Looking Back: Early Childhood Progress in Past 50 Years
Agenda Edu (www.agendaedu.com), a platform that increases engagement in school settings, announced today that Omidyar Network, the philanthropic fund created by Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam Omidya…
Pallavi is an eleventh grade student from Kharagpur, a small town in India that is well known for having one of India’s finest engineering colleges. She and her father aspire for Pallavi to become a …
Today, Omidyar Network, Sesame Workshop, and Promise Venture Studio will kick off Early Futures – a two-day event featuring more than 200 experts, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and policymak…
Although there has been a significant increase over the last 10 years in entrepreneurial activity in US K-12 and higher education, the same cannot be said for early childhood innovation that targets …
Innovation in meeting the needs of young children is not a new thing. Head Start and Sesame Street were both born out of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood celebrated it…
When Brittany Block was in her early 20s, she was building a successful career: earning a cosmetology credential and supervising airline operations. Her life was upended when she met a partner that s…
To gain career experience and help pay for her school tuition, she works part-time on campus and last summer interned with KWCH News 12 Wichita, a local news station. Carolina found and secured both …
Handshake, the leading career network for U.S. college students, announced today that it has closed a $40 million Series C funding round led by the EQT Ventures fund ("EQT Ventures"), a European mult…
For people currently working in early childhood, the time when we did not understand the importance of the first five years of life may seem like a distant past. We now recite with ease the criticali…
Sarah was a teacher’s aide and wanted to take her passion for children to the next level and become a certified teacher. Alejandro needed financial stability, and saw a career in accounting as a path…
This week, the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly opened, and global leaders are actively discussing our progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Across the US and around the world, education technology, or “edtech,” has been under attack.
Education technology (also known as “edtech”) too often seems like a luxury found only in well-off communities. But while it does have the potential to exacerbate inequities in education, it can act…
How will technology impact learning outcomes? It has become increasingly clear that just getting computers to students does not improve learning outcomes. In a recently published review of evidence b…
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst performing region in education outcomes with 40 percent of children not meeting basic outcomes in literacy and numeracy.
Today, Khan Academy announces the launch of Khan Academy Kids — the first early learning platform that is both personalized and focused on the whole child — and we could not be more excited for them …
Grupo VI-DA seeks to close Latin America’s literacy and digital literacy gap by providing a suite of digital products to students, schools, and consumers that democratize access to high quality, Span…
Despite progress over the past 20 years to increase access to education around the globe, we remain in a global learning crisis. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, more than 617 millio…
When Kara’s* oldest son came home from his school in Indiana with a flier for a new program promoting school readiness, her first thought was “I don’t know what to expect, but it’s worth a try.”
One of the biggest issues facing higher education in the US today is return on investment. Is the price of a higher education leading to a fulfilling professional career that will enable a student to…
Like everywhere, parents in India demand the best possible education for their children. Today, Indian parents perceive that private schools offer a higher quality education than government-run schoo…
Melanie Richardson, a mental health professional, and Christine Neely, an educator, were twenty-year veterans in their respective fields and met as colleagues while delivering a community based liter…
During Women’s History Month, we want to celebrate women we feel fortunate to work with every day who are pursuing big, bold visions to create positive change for millions of children and families in…
As any parent knows, focusing a three-year-old on any activity requires creativity and perseverance. Imagine if you also had to impart the intellectual, emotional, and social competencies a child wil…
Children are naturally curious. Interacting with their world and their teachers can ignite that curiosity. But they need the space for the spark to occur, and too often our youngest learners don’t ha…
Parents are both the first teachers for their children and stewards for their future learning. Interactions between child and parent in the first few years of life are tremendously important for a ch…
One of the best parts about working and investing in the education sector is having the privilege to meet and connect with educators who dedicate their lives to developing future generations.
At Omidyar Network, we look at the transformative power of technology to help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. And with our investments in US education, we are seeking to address …
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is already disrupting our notions of work and education, and as AI grows more powerful it will dramatically change the skill…
For millions of young Americans, a four-year college degree is the gateway to a modern career. Many others, though, want or need the chance to pursue a rewarding career path sooner and are looking fo…
Edtech is on track to be a $252 billion global industry by 2020, bringing more innovative education tools to the hands of students, teachers, and families around the world.
Tinkergarten is taking education technology outdoors, supporting a play-based, early learning movement that is helping thousands of children in nearly every US state become more ready for kindergarte…
We believe there are few better paths to opportunity and a bright future than a good education, and that an education that begins early in a child’s life sets the tone for everything that follows.
We believe education increases opportunity for all. In this new video, learn why we invested in Bridge International Academies, an organization working to improve student learning outcomes in underse…
IkamvaYouth staff were stumped. Why were high numbers of learners unable to meet the minimum 75% attendance requirement of their after-school tutoring programs? It was a recurring topic at team meeti…
Improving educational outcomes for Brazil’s low-to-middle-income families depends on innovations that include the participation and input of parents and students.
One million of the best jobs in America may go unfilled if our children don’t learn to code. And even for those who will not become professional coders, computer literacy and the basic logic and crit…
If no two students learn the same way, why do many schools teach everyone the same way? The data shows that if all students received the one-on-one support and tutoring that many more affluent studen…
Most people intuitively know the transformational power of a good education on the lives of individuals and their families. There is now also a host of evidence that shows that improving the quality …
Quality early childhood learning opportunities are critical to children’s future success. From childcare to enrichment activities, these opportunities build the foundational skills and mindset to lea…
At Omidyar Network, we believe there are few more direct pathways to opportunity than education. High-quality education can have a greater impact on a young person’s development, livelihood, economic…