UNESCO estimates that 617 million children—nearly all in low-income countries—are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. To overcome this, education systems in the Global South require better and more effective teacher training, more gender equity, better learning processes and more efficient ways of using evidence to better inform planning in the education sector. All of this will help achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, which aims to ensure “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” A key way to hasten progress is addressing knowledge gaps, improving access to evidence, and strengthening systems that support the generation and uptake of evidence and innovations in the Global South.
The Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) is a global response to these challenges. With a budget of over US$75 million, KIX supports the scaling of promising education innovations and strengthens partners’ capacity to address these challenges. KIX is the largest fund solely dedicated to bridging the knowledge gaps that undermine education systems in developing countries.
HOW KIX WORKS
KIX is designed to be shaped by the demand from national education systems and respond to their principal policy and programming challenges. KIX both funds research and facilitates knowledge sharing among country stakeholders to enhance their education systems using relevant evidence and actionable research.
Key mechanisms of KIX include:
- the learning exchange mechanism, which brings together representatives of national education system in four regional hubs to share information, identify best practices, and guide regional priority-setting processes, among other things.
- the funding mechanism, which provides research funding at global and regional levels for knowledge generation and innovation, and learn how to scale proven approaches to education; and
- as supporting activities to these two mechanisms, KIX is developing a results framework to monitor, evaluate, and learn from KIX key mechanisms and a communications and knowledge mobilization strategy to enhance the visibility of the work KIX does, share the evidence that emerges, and encourage research uptake by key decision-makers in the education sector.
WHERE KIX WORKS
KIX brings together 68 low- and middle-income countries that are partners of the Global Partnership for Education to identify common policy challenges and facilitate knowledge sharing and evidence building. KIX currently funds 12 projects, including one project that supports scaling efforts of grantees and conducts research on scaling across them.

KIX TEAM
KIX is implemented by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and includes a globally diverse team.



