IDinsight receives $1.5 million from Echidna Giving to address the primary drivers of gender inequality in education

August 2nd, 2023 – IDinsight announces today a new three-year philanthropic partnership with Echidna Giving to advance gender-sensitive education. The partnership will support Echidna Giving’s mission to advance girls’ education across Africa and Asia by providing data and evidence support to government partners and NGOs; it will also inform a wider learning agenda. 

Echidna Giving’s support is the cornerstone funding of IDinsight’s newly established Gender-Sensitive Education Fund. The fund seeks to achieve three primary outcomes:

1. Enable support for high-impact gender-sensitive education projects in Africa and Asia over the next three years. 
2. Increase IDinsight’s capacity to better discern when and how to elevate a gender-sensitive lens in the decision support we provide to government, NGO, and other partners in their education policies and interventions. 
3. Develop a learning agenda to document, learn from, and share lessons from these experiences with peers in the education and evidence-informed decision-making communities.

This effort will contribute to the larger push for more research on girls’ education, following the COVID-19 pandemic which disproportionately affected girls. Building on its robust experience working with girls’ education providers, IDinsight will work with implementing partners to use mixed research methods that will inform education programs focusing on access, social-emotional learning, pedagogy, and building teacher capacity. IDinsight will identify and select projects using a rigorous criteria based on past learning about the factors that contribute to high-impact evidence application.

Echidna Giving’s funding will enable tailored project support whose data and evidence findings will then be shared across the sector. By crafting, refining, and developing a clear learning agenda, IDinsight will generate insights on our primary research questions using the combination of what we learn from the projects granted under this fund, along with general data analysis of all of our past gender and education projects. The intended audience of these insights will be government actors and other education implementers as well as peer research organizations. 

Echidna Giving’s Program Officer, Dr. Sara Ruto, hopes that this grant will “enable IDinsight to be more responsive to demands for data, especially those poised to enable gender-transformative decisions by policy actors. We commend IDinsight for their effort.”

“IDinsight has grown its portfolio of high-impact projects focused on gender and women’s empowerment, and this new investment will help us extend those learnings into the education sector, which is particularly important right now,” said Marc Shotland, Interim Co-CEO of IDinsight. “The pandemic increased gender disparities in enrollment and educational outcomes – which further hampered girls’ ability to stay in school. The Gender-Sensitive Education Fund, made possible by Echidna, will enable us to best support organizations working hard to address educational disparities, laying the groundwork for gender equity in the labor market, in political representation, and beyond,” 

If you are interested in learning more about how the fund works, please contact Jake Taesang Cho.

About Echidna Giving

Echidna Giving is a private funder focused on supporting the best ways to educate girls, working in lower-income countries to create a positive ripple effect in their families, communities and nations.