Strategic Influence During Start-Up

In the first decade of Room to Read’s work, our primary organizational focus was to bring educational services to the next child, the next class, or the next school. This was our start-up mindset and an ambitious and important-enough aspiration to drive our passion and hard work. Although we had the support of local and national governments to work in schools and tried to integrate our work into normal school processes, our work was mainly in parallel to that of school systems. In these early days of Room to Read, we focused on survival. We didn’t feel particularly confident that we had much to share to influence other international education professionals or government policies. The one thing we did do at this phase was develop a programmatic model that assumed our end game was local government adoption and adaption. With scale and sustainability in mind, we decided to work exclusively in government schools and to have a fixed timeframe for our program interventions. We shared this information openly when negotiating with governments and schools as potential partners.

Then something interesting started to happen. Host governments started to seek Room to Read’s input into national policies and practices. In 2010, requests started to come from many countries. As one example, the Ministry of Education in Bangladesh invited Room to Read to join a committee tasked with overhauling the national educational curriculum. This was the first time that nonprofit organizations were invited to join the government curriculum revision process, and we were thrilled to have an opportunity to influence Bangladesh’s national literacy textbooks and teachers’ guides. In another example, Room to Read Cambodia launched a literacy instruction pilot to improve the way Khmer literacy skills are taught in early grade Cambodian classrooms. The pilot was a huge success, and the Cambodian government invited us to help rewrite their Grade 1 literacy textbook so all children in Cambodia could benefit from our program’s best practices.

Over the past several years, these requests and Room to Read’s contributions have continued to snowball. At present, for example, Room to Read’s grade 1 and 2 reading curricula are being used as the basis for the national curriculum in Nepal, and our grade 1 curriculum is being used as the basis for the national curriculum in Grenada. We are leading in developing supplementary reading materials for a large-scale reading program in Tanzania that is reaching all grade 1 and 2 children in six regions, and we are leading the overall early-grade reading curriculum in Rwanda.

Government officials have begun to take notice of our work. Room to Read has proved itself to be a productive and loyal partner. The statement by a Sri Lankan educational official that we referenced in the introductory chapter, that Room to Read is “the quiet organization that does not say much but gets things done,” is a huge vote of confidence.

We also started to see in some countries that classroom teachers were using our student reading workbooks instead of government reading textbooks. That was not the plan. Our workbooks were meant to close gaps in the reading curriculum, highlight key concepts, and provide children with more opportunities to practice their reading and writing. All of this was to support the core textbook and not replace it.

However, many teachers felt that even though our workbooks were not meant as a complete curriculum, they were easier to use and served as a more effective teaching resource than the regular textbooks. This dynamic became awkward in some early instances because government partners did not appreciate this insubordination. More enlightened governments, though, embraced this teacher interest and sought Room to Read’s counsel for larger educational reforms. It was at that point that we started to work more closely with governments not only on supplementary instructional materials but on the core textbooks and teacher guides.

Strategic Influence in Transition

Gaining a higher profile and having more influence turned out to be a double-edged sword. It created somewhat of an existential crisis of identity that we still discuss today. On the one hand, it was flattering to be invited to policy forums and to participate in consultations about educational reform. We had become confident in our approach, and clear about what we were doing well and what we still needed to improve, and felt we could add real value to these policy discussions. At the same time, any energy that we put into policy discussions, conferences, op-eds in newspapers, or academic journal articles took time away from our direct implementation. The more our opinions were sought, the more we began to question what Room to Read was doing. Were we about helping that next child or community with the absolute highest level of service and compassion, or were we more about influencing larger systems but perhaps not at the same kind of depth or intensity? This was a real question and, in many ways, a long-term organizational struggle that drove to the heart of our vision and mission.

We had casualties along the way. Staff members who joined Room to Read to work directly in schools could not fathom how we could allow even one child to slip through the system without learning to read, or one adolescent girl to leave school for work in a clothing factory. They were uncomfortable discussing trade-offs. They were not interested in discussing “maximum benefit,” such as whether investing all our money and person-power into a small number of children and their families was fair to all the other children we were serving, or whether we should pay attention to reforms that would help all children in a region or country.

It was also during this turbulent transition phase that we started to grapple more with the issue of phaseout: When should we stop working in a country or region? This issue played out much in the same way as the issue of child- or system-level focus of our work. It was uncomfortable because it is never easy to end a long-term relationship, and there are always more children to serve in any geography.

India was at the epicenter of this struggle. By 2010, we had developed a wide footprint across the second-most-populated country in the world. We were working in a relatively small number of projects given India’s size, but our work was spread across many states. Some staff believed that we needed to spread our resources widely so we could show governments that we were serving children throughout the country. Other staff believed that by spreading ourselves so thinly, we were hurting our efficiency and not providing the highest level of service in the communities in which we were working. The latter view won the day, and the India country leadership team had the unenviable responsibility to work with some states on closeout plans.

When education officials in affected states learned the plans, they were most unhappy. They had appreciated Room to Read’s support and believed there was more work to do. One compromise in these delicate negotiations, though, was that Room to Read would train state educational officials in Room to Read’s program activities. This process, initially under the radar and a side project initiated by the India leadership team, turned out to be an exciting model for a new way of working—technical support for educational officials and others—that was part of the inspiration for the new Room to Read Accelerator unit that we described in Chapter 6.

It was also during this transition phase that Room to Read began to see its strategic influence on commercial book publishing. As described earlier in this chapter, this includes assisting in developing new commercial children’s book markets, advocating for higher-quality children’s books from the private sector, and supporting ministries of education that create and oversee approved book lists. This last activity is a sensitive and often politically charged issue. Commercial publishers can make a lot of money selling their books to government schools. Having books selected for approved book lists is therefore a lucrative prize, and the process is often fraught with nontransparent and corrupt processes. In this situation, an ESE such as Room to Read can be in a strategic position to work with ministries on more transparent approval processes. It can also provide technical support to help ministries, as we are now doing in South Africa, to develop selection criteria for approved books that yield higher-quality books and, therefore, more opportunities to promote children’s love of reading.

Strategic Influence as a Mature ESE

Room to Read’s strategic influence as an ESE has grown substantially as we have deepened our work in countries over the years and demonstrated the follow-through and success of our programs. We have developed long-standing, excellent relationships with governments and business leaders around the world. However, it is only in the last few years that we can say that we have been moving into a more mature phase of strategic influence.

The difference is in becoming more proactive instead of reactive in our influence. It is only in the last few years that we made strategic influence a formal part of our work as we actively searched for ways to help incorporate our lessons into larger country systems. We have sought meetings with government officials and private sector leaders. We have hosted policy forums. And we have negotiated projects specifically designed to systematize our approaches. In our 2015–2019 strategic plan, we call this “doing more with less.” It is the way to support more children even though we stay a relatively small organization.

Could we have made this shift earlier in our organizational evolution? Perhaps. Every ESE must decide timing for itself. However, the timing was right for us. In 2016, for example, a small Room to Read team traveled to Myanmar to scope out a new project. A private investor who had business interests in the country was prepared to fund it. We’d heard that it was extremely difficult to collaborate with the Ministry of Education, as the government had historically been closed to outside engagement. Nevertheless, a prominent business leader in the country who had known Room to Read by reputation was eager for us to bring our expertise to the country, and set up a rare meeting with the new minister of education.

This short presentation was sufficient for the minister to support a memorandum of understanding about how the ministry and Room to Read would collaborate pending the success of project funding. Neither the opportunity for this kind of meeting nor the enthusiastic support of the minister could have been possible if Room to Read had not already established itself as a mature ESE elsewhere in the world.

Planning for Government Adoption

What is the difference between a reactive and proactive approach to strategic influence? It is in the planning. Room to Read’s 2015–2019 strategic plan gave us a mandate to share our lessons, experiences, and approaches more broadly. This means building opportunities for strategic influence into our annual planning cycle, devoting staff time and financial resources to it, and monitoring our progress in achieving strategic goals. This does not preclude us from shifting our goals over the course of the year as new opportunities present themselves, but it does help guide us and set reasonable expectations for what we want to do. It also helps us put boundaries around how much time we set aside for this aspect of our work. It lights a bit of a fire under us and gives guidance to country teams that are reluctant to go beyond our direct project work. It also taps into the enthusiasm of country teams that perhaps want to spend too much time wheeling and dealing with government and private-sector partners.

Room to Read has developed a framework for helping country teams maximize the likelihood of system-level adoption of key program elements. We’ve also created a tool for focusing our strategic influence activities. We describe these below.

Setting the Stage

ESEs can create disruptive change in a variety of ways. Yes, we can all give examples of disruptive ideas that have caught like wildfire and have changed the world overnight. The Arab Spring is one example. The spark of democratic fervor in Tunisia in December 2010 spread to many other countries in the Middle East over the following year, forever changing the landscape of the region. However, most technologies that we would classify as “disruptive” require time to take hold and become part of the social fabric of any society: mobile phones, the Internet, or even driverless cars take years, not months, to go fully mainstream.

Often, the technology itself must change and adapt to its user base for it to be successful, despite initial excitement and enthusiasm about it. This takes time and good planning. Someone we admire a lot is Atul Gawande, who goes so far as to say that people tend to romanticize the one-off disruptive successes in the health sector and undervalue the painstaking process of “incrementalism.”¹ It is through long-term, iterative trial and error that some of the best innovations evolve. And it is often through a longer engagement with communities and larger social systems that ESEs can disrupt historical ways of working. It is a mistake to think that disruptive change can just be turned on like a light switch.

In Room to Read’s work, our goal has been to improve the policies and practices of large educational systems. In most countries, government ministries of education are the authorities that oversee elementary and secondary schools. Although some private or religious organizations sometimes develop parallel systems—often competing with governments in the large numbers of schools they manage—this is the exception. Governments are the most likely partners to sustain core program elements after individual school projects end. Governments are also positioned to scale core educational program elements to serve many more children than would be possible for any ESE to do alone.

Anyone who has worked with large government-led education systems, though, knows how difficult it can be to affect larger change. Political appointees come and go, but many government employees work in systems for years. They are acculturated to ways of working that are very difficult to change. In many ways, it is good that governments remain relatively stable over time. An unpredictable government that is too responsive and adaptive would cause anxiety and confusion.

As we illustrate in Figure 9.1, the bigger, the more complex, and the higher cost of a proposed change, the less likely governments will be to adopt that change. This is the lightly shaded triangle on the left. This contrasts with the triangle on the right, which shows the disruptive potential of a truly innovative educational reform idea. The assumption in the right-hand triangle is that the further away the new reform idea is from what the government is currently doing, the greater the benefit. The question is how to reconcile these differences: making an effective new reform palatable to government (or other system-level) stakeholders. We want to grow the overlapping triangle as much as possible.

The answer (see Figure 9.2) is to make the slope of the left-hand triangle more gradual and the slope of the right-hand triangle steeper. In this way, the overlapping area under the two triangles becomes larger, and governments are more likely to adopt new policies or practices.

How do you do this? Let’s start with the right-hand triangle. The way to make the slope steeper is to improve the quality and benefits of the program. This is the kind of incremental, in-the-weeds, trial-and-error, long-term process that Gawande lauds in his article. What about the left-hand triangle? The best way to temper the slope is to show governments or other system-level partners that it is possible to achieve their own goals in a way that is simpler and more cost effective, that will be embraced by users, and that can be absorbed in a relatively easy way. Oh, and by the way, the extent to which the changes can promote goodwill, good press, or other public acknowledgment for the government, all the better!

Only So Far, So Fast

The likelihood of governments or other partners adopting an ESE’s program or program elements is also based on what Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development,” or ZPD. Vygotsky, a Byelorussian psychologist who lived and worked early in the twentieth century, believed that people had range of knowledge that they could learn on their own based on their experiences and stage of development. The further away a new idea was from that ZPD, the more support a person needed to grasp it and incorporate it into his or her worldview.

This concept is central in Room to Read’s approach to classroom instruction. When a teacher introduces a new letter or vocabulary word, she runs through a series of activities herself. She could introduce the sound using the letter at the beginning of a word—cat, car, can, crawl—or use the new word in a sentence: “The cat crawled under the car.” Next, she could read a paragraph in the textbook with the new letters and words together with her class. Last, she could ask individual children to read the same or similar paragraph on their own. This approach is called “I do / we do / you do,” and it is an excellent strategy for helping grow children’s ZPD. It introduces new content gradually and in a way that children’s minds can assimilate, especially when they are already familiar with the daily instructional approach.

Similarly, it is important to understand the zone of proximal development of the people whom you are trying to influence. Is support for girls’ education a familiar concept, or does Room to Read need to help ease more traditional communities and government officials into the concept gradually? Are book authors in a lower-income country familiar with children’s storybooks? Or might they benefit from seeing a selection of children’s storybooks from another country to expose them to new ideas? A new technology can only be disruptive if the ultimate consumers understand it and perceive it to be valuable for themselves.

Plotting System-Level Adoption

Okay. Your ESE has developed strong programming, and you have hard data about its effectiveness. You have carefully organized your work to be primed for scaling (for example, you know that your approach can achieve impact at a system level, is easy to adopt, is enticing for users, and is cost effective) and are ready to go. What next? How do you plan for strategic influence and larger-level system adoption? What are your goals? How do you track your progress?

These are the questions that we have been asking ourselves at Room to Read over the past few years given that strategic government engagement is now a more explicit organizational goal. One of the biggest questions that we had to answer was how much we cared about maintaining the Room to Read brand. In other words, how much did we care that governments adopt “THE Room to Read approach” as part of their scaling efforts?

This is not a selfish question. ESEs work hard to develop their approaches. Shouldn’t we be recognized for our work? In addition, as we have discussed previously, letting go of one’s ownership allows others to change your work based on their own views and brand. Are you ready for that? Most importantly, if an organization becomes invisible because it is giving away its approach (its “intellectual property”), then how can it sustain itself financially? How can it ensure that it can continue to grow brand awareness and revenue to continue to do good work in the future?

Our current view is that we genuinely want our materials to be shared as widely as possible, and, given the hard work that we have put into the development of our programs, we strongly prefer to be paid for our work. At the very least, we feel that it is appropriate for governments and other partners to acknowledge Room to Read’s contributions to new policies and practices. We also want to be able to tell our investors about successes so they know how their contributions continue to make a difference in the world. Our investors tend to be quite happy when a ministry of education adopts our work for extended use.

Most important to us is that governments and other system-level organizations ultimately adopt the elements of Room to Read programming that we believe lead to children’s educational success, irrespective of whether they explicitly adopt the Room to Read approach. When we believe that governments understand the importance of a program element and have incorporated it into their own work, we can then relax, and we can focus on getting them to adopt a different program element or focus our time and attention on another country.

To be more proactive in promoting system-level adoption, where appropriate, we have created a “government adoption” tool for countries to use in their long-term and annual planning. The challenge in working with governments is that a policy is just a lot of words on paper unless governments act on it. We have seen this in several countries in which there is a conceptual commitment to improve reading levels, promote school libraries, and even support girls to stay in school longer. Often, however, governments take very little action to ensure these outcomes. Entrepreneurial social enterprises can be important “fire starters” with governments to catalyze and mobilize action.

So, at Room to Read we created a tool that helped us hold ourselves accountable for playing this important fire-starter role. The tool, reproduced in Figure 9.3, includes a section for our Literacy Program and a section for our Girls’ Education Program. The rows in the tool reflect the core elements of Room to Read’s programs that we believe are important for children’s educational success. We have tested many individual elements empirically through various assessments and rating systems; others need further testing but have been checked with many country and school-level staff as key parts of our programming.

The assumption, after substantial internal discussion and analysis, is that if a school, district, province, or country were to have these program elements in place—irrespective of whether they were implemented by a ministry of education, Room to Read, or some other organization—young children would achieve substantial success in their early grade reading and many more girls would complete high school with skills to succeed in the next phases of their lives.

The columns in the tool reflect the various stages of system-level adoption. The first column represents the first step in government adoption, “Understanding each element.” Do government officials understand what we mean, for example, by “Systems for checkout and management of books”? Second, do they agree that the program element is important enough to incorporate into their overall programming? In other words, officials can understand what we are trying to do but still not agree with the concept or prioritize it enough to build it into their system.

If there is agreement, we move to the next stage, which is preparation. Has the government started to build the element into its policies or practices in a way that demonstrates its seriousness of intent? India’s 2009 right-to-education law, for example, includes a provision that all schools should have school libraries. The Ministry of Education in Cambodia is developing an integrated life-skills curriculum with targets for children’s success and related tracking measures.

Next is actual use. Is the government implementing the program element? In Nepal, for example, five districts are piloting the national reading curriculum that started with Room to Read’s approach. The textbook and related teacher’s guide have already been rolled out in more than 1,600 schools and are being used by 128,000 children. Grenada is building libraries in all its 57 government elementary schools, with five completed and the remainder scheduled for the next two years.

Last, are the program elements being implemented with success? In system-level implementation, are children developing the habit of reading and the necessary reading skills? Are girls completing high school in larger numbers and demonstrating more success in university and the workplace?

Each Room to Read country team completes this tool as part of its multiyear planning process based on the best information at hand. It is not a scientific process. Much of the work is subjective. However, completing the tool initially gives a good baseline for where a community or country might be in adopting essential program elements. It also helps Room to Read think about its strategic engagement activities. It helps us to see that we do not need to continue to work on an issue if the government is already on board and achieving success. We can shift our attention to other issues.

After country teams complete the tool, the last task is to identify a few of the elements to focus on strategically. The team then builds a set of activities to help move the system from one stage of development to another. If government officials are not yet aware of the importance of family support for reading and writing, the Room to Read country team could decide to meet with government officials, work with newspapers to tell stories of effective parental involvement in their children’s education, or host a policy forum. If ministry of education officials have already agreed to the importance of parental education, we could work with them to prepare and implement a national reading campaign.

The Power of Convening Critical Friends and Advisors

One of the fun aspects of working in the social impact space is witnessing the collaboration between organizations and individuals. They both are committed to sharing knowledge and experiences to promote peer learning and developing “communities of practice” for key social issues.

To leverage this collaboration and improve Room to Read’s work, we have regularly convened a diverse group of thought leaders to provide input on big issues we are grappling with as an organization. We call these meetings our “convenings of critical friends and advisors.” We invite a wide variety of stakeholders, including education experts from other nonprofits, academic institutions, bilateral and multilateral development institutions, as well as private investors, corporate investors, and staff members. The idea is to bring as many different voices and perspectives into the room when discussing and debating strategic issues. We always hold these gatherings as part of our global strategic planning process.

Global Board of Directors

Another influential group of stakeholders for Room to Read is our global board of directors. The relationship between a board of directors and the management of a for-profit business is a multifaceted one, and it is not any different in the social sector. For nonprofits, boards of directors of course provide fiduciary and strategic oversight, as well as bring additional revenue and influential networks with them. We are fortunate at Room to Read to have always had a global board of directors that sees one of its primary goals is to build connections, awareness, and, most importantly, revenue. Like in other parts of our growth story, we went through a lot of trial and error before we found the right balance of how to engage and leverage our board for maximum impact.

In the early stage of an ESE, the board of directors is often most aligned and connected to the founding team. Many boards at this stage really act as personal boards of directors for the social entrepreneurs. Given the ups and downs of making it through the start-up years, having a supportive board capable of giving sound advice and cheering you on is enormously helpful. The challenge comes when the organization starts to grow rapidly. The board of directors needs to evolve along the same trajectory as the organization.

We’ve worked hard at Room to Read to ensure that our board grows with us and brings new skills and expertise as we need it. Today it is made up of committed individuals from a range of different industries, geographies, and experiences whom we trust to help guide our strategy and direction. Several of our board members come from the corporate sector. We also have a couple of key board seats for international education experts. Many board members are CEOs and executives who have struggled with similar issues when growing their own businesses. Here are some of the principles that we have learned over the years of how to best manage our partnership with these individuals.

Influence in the International Space

Finally, there are some additional considerations for ESEs that seek to influence policy and practice at the global level as well as raise funds from a geographically diverse base. The challenge is to create a presence worldwide that allows Room to Read to engage in meaningful ways across multiple geographies. There is never enough time, people, or money to be everywhere we want to be, so we have had to focus our efforts on building a global network.

When it comes to influencing policy, ESEs such as Room to Read play a particularly important role because community-level experience in multiple countries provides critical information for international institutions seeking to scale effective strategies.

At Room to Read, we have started to build time for our global office staff to engage in strategic policy discussions and forums. We believe now, as the world community has ratified the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve by 2030, information from organizations like ours is more critical than ever. However, like our work in country offices, we must be rigorous and disciplined in what we choose to do. We run on a razor thin margin without much room for unplanned activities. So, during our annual planning process, we plan our strategic engagement activities carefully.

Room to Read has built credibility in international policy forums over the years, primarily because of our long-term commitment and follow-through in countries and communities. We have been able to make these commitments due to the fact that we are primarily privately funded. One key way we have cultivated this independent source of funding is by building a constellation of regional development and advisory boards in the various key markets we fundraise in from Europe to Asia-Pacific to Australia. These are “boards for busy people,” in which the focus is on growing our brand and networks in each market. Our regional advisory board strategy accelerates the collective movement as Room to Read leverages influential people from corporate, media, and philanthropic networks. These people represent our local presence to unlock the leadership and investment required to support Room to Read in being a world-class, global organization.