2024: our impact on millions of children around the world

In a year of global challenges and changes, Theirworld’s projects and initiatives reached millions of children and young people in more than 140 countries throughout 2024.

Our mission to give everyone the best start in life, a safe place to learn and skills for the future saw us deliver innovative and life-changing projects, expand a successful global early years campaign and invest in the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs.

Since the launch of Theirworld’s new five-year strategy in 2022, we have impacted over 30 MILLION learners, educators and caregivers through more than 40 projects, emergency responses and Education Innovation Awards winners.

And we have trained a network of 8,477 Global Youth Ambassadors to advocate and campaign for education change in their communities and around the world.

Our 2024 review film gives a flavour of our work throughout the year. Watch it here.

Now here’s a more detailed look at some of Theirworld’s work during another momentous 12 months of unlocking big change. 

Act For Early Years campaign

The Act For Early Years campaign – launched in 2023 by Theirworld – has grown into a global movement of more than 150 organisations calling for extensive new funding for early childhood development.

In building the campaign we have established a High-level Advisory Group of renowned early childhood organisations, such as UNICEF, UNESCO and the Lego Foundation, and agreed a strategic roadmap. This brings the expertise, knowledge and networks together behind a shared vision and goals, to maximise impact.

Our work throughout the year culminated in major announcements at the G20 summit in Brazil last month. In the run-up to that, Theirworld held special events throughout 2024 to raise awareness of the need for early years investment. In April, we hosted an event in Tanzania featuring commitments from African Union leaders and passionate pleas from our Global Youth Ambassadors. In the same month, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown called on world leaders to invest at least $1 billion in the world’s youngest children as a Theirworld report revealed UNICEF and the World Bank are leading the way.

During the UN General Assembly in September, our Global Youth Ambassadors hosted the Act For Early Years Symposium in New York. And a Theirworld report revealed modest spending increases by countries can produce dramatic results within just a few years for young children and women.

These efforts – and Act For Early Years’ tireless work with the Brazilian government and a coalition of partners to make early childhood a top priority on the G20 agenda – led to a series of commitments.

At the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, the new Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty was launched, with a strong focus on early childhood. The alliance will transform support for the early years of children’s lives by focusing on – and investing in – early childhood care and education. It aims to support more than 200 million children and women.

A series of commitments to accelerate action was announced by governments including Mozambique, Palestine, Angola, Paraguay, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Madagascar. Brazil continued to show leadership by announcing an expansion of its early childhood visitation programme to reach 300,000 more children and a new national policy which will be launched in February.

Many other governments and international banks said they will provide finance and/or knowledge to help these and other countries grow their maternal and early childhood support programmes, including the UK and France, the World Bank and the Inter-Amercian Development Bank (IADB).

Theirworld committed the support of Act For Early Years to advance early development initiatives globally. The campaign will track commitments from the G20, encourage the first-ever Finance Summit on Early Childhood and collaborate with more than 150 key early childhood partners on the campaign goals.

Projects and partners

So far in our five-year strategy, we have invested in more than 40 projects and supported 36 small community grant initiatives and thousands of young people in 141 countries

Our mission is to ensure every child has the best start in life, a safe place to learn and skills for the future. Projects that reflect these pillars include:

Best start in life. The Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory, created by Theirworld in 2004, continues its work to improve understanding of what causes early birth, how we can develop treatments to prevent it and how we can better help newborn babies. As part of that research, the Theirworld Edinburgh Birth Cohort follows the progress of 400 children from birth to age 25.

Safe place to learn. On the second anniversary of the full Russian invasion in February, Theirworld announced we are working with the Ukrainian government on two major projects. We are supporting the £5 million state-of-the-art Museum of Mathematics in Kyiv and working with the government on a national childhood education and development initiative. Over the past two years, we helped to distribute more than 70,000 laptops to keep Ukrainian children learning.

Skills for the future. The latest edition of the Youth Skills and Employment Accelerator was launched in the United States by the Global Business Coalition for Education, an initiative of Theirworld. The Accelerator helps nonprofits that work with young people from underserved communities connect with other organisations, businesses and funders to improve their skills and employment prospects.

Across the three pillars, Theirworld harnesses the potential of education in five vital areas.

Climate action. Our work with Earth Warriors in southern Africa provides climate education to children aged three to 11 faced with floods and droughts. The programme has reached almost 3,000 students.

Gender equality. We work with the ZanaAfrica Foundation in Kenya to deliver lessons on “taboo” subjects such as puberty and reproductive health. The programme has trained 1,000 teachers and reached 200,000 girls.

Inclusion. Theirworld commissioned research that revealed the shocking extent of bullying and discrimination that young LGBTQ+ people face at school and university in the UK and US. We launched a global task force on safe schools and learning opportunities for LGBTQ+ youth.

Peace and security. In response to conflict in the Middle East, Theirworld is preparing several reports and projects that build on our expertise in early childhood development and emergencies. They include supporting children in Lebanon whose education has been affected by displacement and a report on the most critical challenges facing young children in Gaza. In Israel, we are exploring the unique needs of children under five resulting from conflict, trauma and antisemitism.

Health and nutrition. With Theirworld’s support, Jeeva Jyothi has set up three early childhood development centres in India for children living in slums and rural villages through a project called Blooming Buds.

Global Youth Ambassadors

Theirworld’s Global Youth Ambassador (GYA) programme is a network of 2,000 young people from more than 140 countries working together to end the global education crisis.

They played a key role this year in promoting the Act For Early Years campaign – spreading the message around the world. In September, GYAs hosted Theirworld’s Act For Early Years Symposium and met with government ministers and education leaders.

GYAs mobilised on the Day of the African Child to urge African Union officials to increase investment in early childhood education and spoke at the AU leaders’ conference in Tanzania.

A total of 8,477 young people have now been trained through the two-year programme since 2022.

Theirworld Education Innovation Awards

We announced two sets of awards winners during 2024. In June, we revealed that seven fantastic projects with a focus on the early years had been selected in the third edition of the Theirworld Education Innovation Awards. They took part in masterclasses, had one-to-one mentoring and up will receive grants of up to £50,000 to help them expand their exciting and inspiring programmes to reach even more learners.

Last month, we announced that 10 exciting and inspiring learning projects for marginalised children are winners of the fourth edition of the awards, which were launched in 2021 and are open to non-profits, NGOs and charities.

Fundraising and supporters

Our supporters counted steps throughout June for the Theirworld, Your Walk challenge – raising more than £35,000 for laptops to allow Ukrainian children to keep learning despite the conflict.

We hosted some inspiring events this year that highlighted Theirworld’s work. In June we held a reception for key supporters at London’s Marlborough House, the headquarters of the Commonwealth of Nations, which celebrated our Global Youth Ambassador programme.

We were in Edinburgh in November for a dinner hosted at Valvona and Crolla, where we highlighted the work of the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory as part of our World Prematurity Day appeal.

This month we took part in The Big Give Christmas Challenge to raise funds for four of our early years projects. With donations matched by generous donors, we raised an incredible £80,000 to help make a huge difference in our efforts to give every child the best start in life.

Events

Theirworld and the Global Business Coalition for Education hosted several events during 2024 – including the Act For Early Years Symposium (mentioned earlier) and Harnessing AI for the Future of Africa, which was attended by leaders from business, government, academia and civil society.

During the UN General Assembly, the high-level event Educating for the Next Generation spotlighted how education can be crucial in tackling issues such as climate, conflict and unemployment. It was co-hosted by Sarah Brown, Chair of Theirworld and Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education.

Research and reports

A Theirworld global survey of teachers revealed in September that millions of young children around the world are not developmentally ready when they start school. The shocking findings – which show many four and five-year-olds cannot perform simple tasks such as identifying numbers and letters or washing their hands – was covered by media in several countries.

Research through the Theirworld Edinburgh Birth Cohort is entering a new phase – discovering how early challenges affect premature children’s learning and what can be done to address it. On World Prematurity Day last month, we told how one boy had his developmental needs identified through the world-first cohort, which is run by the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh.

Global Business Coalition for Education

The Theirworld initiative, based in New York, continued to positively affect the lives of children and young people in the United States and around the world through its campaigning, thought leadership and high-level events

The Global Business Coalition for Education made significant strides towards its strategic target of enabling 200 businesses to help make a difference to the lives of 50 million people through education by 2028.

That included welcoming global household names Google, Microsoft and Toyota to the coalition and representing the private sector on multilateral organisations providing more than $8 billion in education funding. The coalition also partnered with Ukraine’s Ministry of Education to distribute 125,000 laptops and tablets to refugees and displaced teachers and children.