Investing in Evidence, Empowering Education: Why the BHP Foundation’s Education Equity Program Will Matter for Decades

From that insight, the Education Equity (EE) Program was born — supporting five global organizations across more than 100 countries. Rather than prescribing a fixed strategy, the Foundation supported partners’ highest‑priority needs — an intentionally trust‑based, flexible, and capacity‑building approach. Over several years, these partners worked to generate, strengthen, and mobilize evidence to improve learning outcomes for children and young people. 

RAND’s Evaluation: What We Learned 

To understand the Program’s impact and lessons learned, the Foundation commissioned a six-year independent evaluation from the RAND Corporation. RAND reviewed partners’ internal and external evaluations, conducted interviews with partner staff and Foundation leaders, and developed case studies on selected strands of work. 

RAND’s analysis confirmed much of what we know about education reform: it is slow, non-linear, and shaped by complex systems. The partners made strong progress on evidence generation, network-building, and knowledge sharing, but many long-term ambitions required more time. 

Across contexts, partners identified consistent lessons: 

• Evidence must be rigorous, accessible, and locally relevant
• Co‑creation with local partners drives demand and system change
• Advocacy must be paired with technical assistance to support implementation
• Evidence is most effective when integrated into existing system processes
• Networks accelerate learning and innovation

The evaluation also highlighted something powerful: The Foundation’s trust-based, flexible, capacity-building approach strengthened the partners themselves, setting them up for enduring influence. For a brand-new foundation, BHP Foundation’s approach to the EE Program was, in many respects, bold and progressive. At a time when philanthropy was (and often still is) top down and directive towards grantees, the Foundation trusted experts to know what was needed for the sector and was willing to invest in the organizational capacity and growth of the partners in service of sustained impact. 

In the time since RAND completed its final data collection, the impact of the Foundation’s approach and investments have become even more visible: 

• Teach For All launched the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future in Singapore — an initiative directly enabled by BHP Foundation’s investment in the Global Learning Lab six years earlier. This new hub is now training educators from around the world using insights from underserved schools.
• UN Women successfully launched an outcomes-based financing mechanism in Mexico, raising over USD $1 million from government and private actors to empower vulnerable women. A similar initiative is now underway in India, aiming to support 10,000 women entrepreneurs.
• Global Business Coalition for Education now occupies highly influential seats, including on the Board of the Global Partnership for Education, the world’s largest education fund, helping shape global agendas.
• Brookings Center for Universal Education’s costing tool has catalyzed the creation of a Global Costing Taskforce now backed by multiple major funders.
• The Education Endowment Foundation’s Education Evidence Network (EEN), once a small component of the Foundation’s grant, has become central to global evidence infrastructure — recognized by UNESCO, the World Bank, the UK Cabinet Office, and highlighted at the UN Summit of the Future. Major donors, including the Wellcome Trust and Jacobs Foundation, have invested in scaling this evidence architecture further.

The initiatives now expanding globally — the institutes, outcomes-based financing models, networks, toolkits, coalitions, and policy influence — are direct descendants of the Foundation’s early investment choices. They will continue to shape the field for years to come. 

Education is a long-game, and investments need to be viewed through that lens  

Improving education systems is about aligning the entire system — teachers, policymakers, institutions, communities — round the vision that every child deserves a meaningful education. 

But systems are often dysfunctional, under-resourced, and slow to adapt. So, the work requires: 

• patience
• persistence
• learning
• local partnership
• and willingness to support long-term capability, not just projects

The EE Program embodied this philosophy. Its impacts, many only now visible, prove that long-game thinking is not only necessary, but transformational. 

Therefore, perhaps the most crucial message for donors and global actors is: 

If you want to change education systems, you must be willing to invest in the long term — and invest in the people and institutions who will carry the work forward. 

The EE Program demonstrated what becomes possible when philanthropy trusts experts, supports organizational growth, and stays committed to a vision larger than any single project. 

Its legacy is just beginning.