Executive Summary

Project Host:

Project Host: Fundación Aprender a Quererte

Fellows:

Daniel Ansari, Research Fellow
Lissett Babaian, Team Lead, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Dietsje Jones, Research Fellow
Simi Lawoyin, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Introduction 

Fundación Aprender a Quererte (FAAQ) is a new philanthropic platform dedicated to enhancing educational opportunities and fostering economic mobility in Colombia. Over the next few years, FAAQ aims to become an incubator for Colombia’s public education sector—identifying, adapting, and rigorously testing educational solutions before partnering with the government to achieve scale.

Organisation’s role & strength

FAAQ’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to rapidly test and refine education solutions, ensuring they are relevant to local needs, feasible to implement and scale, and effective in helping kids learn.

FAAQ's flagship program, Enseñar al Nivel Adecuado (ENAd), is an accelerated learning initiative aimed at ensuring that all students master foundational literacy and numeracy skills before they transition out of primary school. This program brings Pratham's Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach—successfully implemented across Africa and Asia—to Colombia and Latin America for the first time.

Need summary

Through the ENAd program, FAAQ has reached 3,500 children in Bogotá and 4,800 in Risaralda. To monitor, evaluate, and learn from these pilots, FAAQ has adapted several of Pratham's research instruments and developed additional tools to provide a more holistic view. This data has allowed FAAQ to track student and teacher progress and respond quickly when needed. At the same time, FAAQ’s current MEL system revealed several gaps, particularly in data generation and use, which were validated by the Jacobs Foundation's Evidence Navigation Journey (ENJOY) framework. To address these gaps, the Fellows prioritized the following questions to explore during the LEAP Sprint.

1. Based on the available ASER data, what insights can be gained regarding the effectiveness of the ENAd program? How can these insights inform the content and implementation of the program?

2. What are the limitations of the current data and the open questions that remain? How can data collection be refined to address these gaps?

3. How can data collection and utilization processes be optimized and systematized to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of data-driven decision making?

4. What specific guidelines and templates can be developed to enhance the consistency and usability of data collection, analysis, and reporting?

Solution summary & next steps

Deliverable 1:

This deliverable provides FAAQ with concrete advice on how to grow their ambition to become the leading Educational Solutions Lab’ In Colombia. To be an effective education solutions and evidence lab, it is essential to use data and insights for continuous improvement and informed decision-making. This involves actively generating evidence that helps FAAQ and others adapt programs to the unique needs of Colombia. Deliverable 1 provides guidance on analyzing and visualizing current ASER data, as well as on enhancing future data acquisition to generate actionable evidence. Specifically, Deliverable 1 provides detailed guidance on different ways to analyze and visualize data that FAAQ has previously collected during their implementation of their ENAd program. The analyses, findings, and recommendations that are presented are meant as an example that can be transferred to other data sets that FAAQ may be collecting in the future and they grow as an Educational Solutions Lab’.

Deliverable 2:

Deliverable 2 provides FAAQ with a practical toolkit to strengthen data use across the program cycle. It consists of two integrated tools: the Evidence-to-Action (E2A) Framework for planning MEL strategies, and the E2A Tracker for documenting data collection, analysis, learning, and follow-through on reporting and taking action. Together, the tools give life to the recommendations in Deliverable 1 by making it easier for staff to collect the right data, ask the right questions, and follow through on what the evidence reveals.The toolkit reflects FAAQ’s emerging identity as an Evidence Lab by supporting systematic, intentional, and adaptive learning at the program level.