Narrator: Around the world,
53% of children in low- and middle-income countries
are experiencing learning poverty.
To make this challenging situation better,
a broad-ranging partnership is improving access to education
and setting up underserved communities
for long-term success: the Learning Passport.
(gentle music)
-: The idea behind the Learning Passport
was to bring digital learning to children on the move,
children affected by humanitarian crises,
like war or natural disasters.
And what we were really trying to do in the beginning
was to bring digital learning to these children
that didn't have the opportunity
to engage in any type of digital ecosystem,
or digital learning experience, where they were.
So a lot of that initial work was
how do you do digital learning without the internet?
And how to take some of the technology
that Microsoft gave us and put it to work in the places
that it really matters for UNICEF.
So that's refugee camps, IDP centers,
places that you
would typically consider humanitarian environments.
-: So the biggest challenge the Learning Passport
is trying to address is the digital divide.
So today we have 1.3 billion children and young people
that do not have access to the internet,
do not have access to digital learning solutions.
-: The digital divide for UNICEF, from our perspective,
is a fundamental problem,
because it's only going to widen the gap
between the haves and the have-nots
of that digital productivity, of that digital participation.
This is a completely new innovation
that was driven by UNICEF and by Microsoft
to deliver fully digital learning experiences
for individuals, children and teachers, parents,
community members, even humanitarian frontline workers
or social workers or people traditionally outside
of the education space.
This can deliver digital learning
without an internet connection at all.
-: Technology has so much potential
to supercharge UNICEF's goals,
and the Learning Passport is an example of that.
The partnership with Microsoft enabled that
to be possible in a digital way by creating online
and offline learning opportunities
for people all around the world.
-: The goal of the Learning Passport
is to reach 55 million learners over the next 10 years,
and that is not going to be possible unless
we can crowd others into our ecosystem of partners.
UNICEF brought together its global footprint,
its 70-plus years of expertise;
Microsoft brought us world-class technology;
BCG helped in terms of our business planning and approach;
and without those three core elements,
the Learning Passport would not be where it is today.
So BCG has been with us since the early stages.
In 2019, they helped us develop
our first foundational business plan,
and what has happened since then is we've seen
a tremendous amount of growth in the program.
-: In 2019, we were really wanting to understand
how can we design and scale a product
that enables students without access to the internet
the opportunity to learn?
Then again, in 2023,
you can imagine the world had fundamentally changed.
And so in 2023, the question really was,
how do we capitalize on the immense growth
that the Learning Passport product has had
and develop a business model that's sustainable
and enables longer-term scale?
-: Last year, we were at a very important inflection point.
We needed to figure out,
how are we going to scale and sustain this moving forward?
And so BCG came in and they did two very critical things.
First, they pressure-tested our vision,
our plans for the future, our approach
against what they were seeing out in the industry.
They were able to then use a public-sector approach
and say, "What are the risks here?
What are the opportunities?
What type of resourcing do you need?
Do you have the right structure?
Are you bringing in the right partners?"
-: And one of the really good things that BCG did,
because of their fluency with the UN
and with the world I live in,
they were able to understand a lot of other stuff
in the space and compare us in a pretty objective way
with the other actors that the Learning Passport
is in league with.
Claudia: One of the things that was a real hallmark
of this effort was the need to bring together the UN system
and its perspectives and its scale
with a private-sector lens
around product design, business model,
and how the private sector thinks about scale,
as well as national governments
and their priorities around enabling access to education.
-: From 2018 and 2019,
when we were working with BCG on the initial business case
with Learning Passport, to today,
there are now 40 countries using Learning Passport.
We're about to hit 7 million learners worldwide.
-: When we started in 2018, 2019, it was an idea,
so the fact that we've made it this far,
we've really tested, I think,
the waters in terms of what's possible
when you bring UNICEF together with
a number of other organizations like Microsoft
and the University of Cambridge.
And so the fact that the Learning Passport is a living,
breathing program that's reaching almost 7 million people
is absolutely incredible.
But I think what I'm most proud of is the team
that we've built around it,
the community of supporters that believe in the vision,
believe in the ability for the Learning Passport
to really make a tremendous impact in the lives of children
and educators around the world.
(gentle music)