Locally Built, Designed to Scale: Putting the Buzzwords to Work
“Locally led.” “Inclusive.” “Scalable.” “Sustainable.” These ideas appear everywhere in global development strategies, but putting them into practice inside education systems is considerably harder.
This session will explore what it takes to move those ambitions from buzzwords to working principles. Drawing on experience across Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, and other low-resource settings, four education organizations will share a practical framework built around four essential Ls: Local, Leave no-one, Leverage, and Links.
The starting point is the reality of implementation. Education programs must navigate exclusion and harmful social norms, limited resources, siloed interventions, competing stakeholder agendas, and the challenge of supporting children whose wellbeing and ability to learn are shaped by factors far beyond the classroom. Approaches that work in one community can also lose the very qualities that made them effective when organizations try to take them to scale.
So what does it take to scale without losing local ownership? How can education systems embed support for marginalized groups rather than treating inclusion as a standalone intervention? How can locally developed solutions strengthen economic resilience, wellbeing, and climate action alongside learning? And what kinds of partnerships and connections allow good ideas to travel without simply copying them from one context to another?
Rather than presenting the four Ls as a finished formula, the session will use them as a practical lens for participants to interrogate their own work. The goal is to explore how local leadership, inclusion, leverage, and stronger links across systems can help build education approaches that endure and adapt as they grow.
What to expect
A participatory workshop grounded in real examples from low-resource education systems. The hosts will briefly introduce common barriers they have encountered when trying to scale inclusive education approaches and share examples of how communities and organizations have responded.
Participants will then apply the four Ls to their own contexts, examining where their programs or systems are strong, where gaps remain, and what they could do differently. The emphasis will be on leaving with ideas and actions that can be tested in practice.
Who this is for
This session is for NGO and civil society leaders, education practitioners, funders, government partners, and others working in low- and middle-income countries who are grappling with how to make education interventions more locally led, inclusive, connected, and capable of reaching greater scale.
What you will get out of it
A practical framework for examining local leadership, inclusion, leverage, and connections within education programs
Lessons from organizations navigating the realities of scaling in low-resource settings
New perspectives on scaling approaches without losing local ownership or excluding marginalized groups
Space to apply the four Ls directly to challenges in your own work
Concrete ideas and actions you can take back to your organization or education system
Hosted by
AfriKids
Chance for Childhood
Link Community Development Malawi
Link Education International