Founded in 2000 on the belief that World Change Starts with Educated Children®, Room to Read develops children’s foundational literacy skills, as well as life skills that promote gender equality across 29 countries, with more than 60 million children cumulatively benefitted through our literacy and gender equality programming as of Dec 2025.

Across a portfolio of over 15 countries, Room to Read has demonstrated an evidence-based approach to enhance foundational literacy among early grade children through a combination of a structured pedagogic approach to teach literacy and an exposure to appropriate children’s literature through functional school libraries. Building on these strong demonstrations, Room to Read embarked upon a journey to scale up our offerings through government systems to reach more children more quickly. Though various countries are at different levels of this scale up journey, our experiences of engaging with governments across countries during the last ten years have provided us with definitive learnings around scale-up through government systems.

The overall approach involves integrating/embedding the principal components of our demonstration program into the government system, along with strengthening of the system to implement and sustain the new components.

Program integration

Successful integration of programmatic components like curriculum, pedagogic approach, materials and training depends on the prevailing policy environment, openness of governments to reforms and political/ bureaucratic considerations. However, the following strategies/ activities have generally worked well across geographies:

• A high-quality intervention, with demonstrated results, helps build acceptance among government officials and provides the necessary evidence base for the government to decide on a scale-up.
• It is, however, not enough to only have good results and quality interventions. Presenting and highlighting the results at the right forums (workshops, visibility events) help create a demand for their adoption and integration within the system.
• Champions within the government help create acceptance within the system. It is therefore helpful to identify and nurture such champions, not only at the highest level, but across all levels of governance.
• While quality programs, advocacy events and champions can open the door for government engagement, system integration requires continuous engagement with all levels of the government, flexible planning and adaptive strategies. While top-level engagement can help push reforms and changes, especially in a centralized governance structure, engagement with middle-tier officials and teachers is necessary for reforms to stick and sustain.
• Co-creation of curriculum, materials, training content and story books along with government experts/ officials and teachers is the best way to facilitate integration. This process involves engaging closely with government curriculum and material developers, academic bodies and teachers, and then jointly developing the content. Co-creation creates a high level of ownership within government stakeholders. It also builds government capacity to keep developing more materials and sustain the reforms.

Addressing Implementation Challenges

Integration of program components into government curriculum and content is however only the first step in a systemic scale-up process. Where most projects fail is in implementing these revised protocols at the school level. Implementing at scale is very different from implementing in a limited number of schools. The following gaps are usually noted in translating policy/design changes into classroom practice.

• Lack of adequate funding to buy books and instruction materials.
• Delay in printing and distribution of instruction materials.
• Non availability of children’s books in local markets.
• Dilution in quality of teacher training along the training cascade.
• Non-availability of coaches to support teachers, or overstretched coaches when available.
• Lack of a proper monitoring and review system.
• Middle-tier officials and institutions are not aware of reform ideas.
• No systemic assessment of children’s learning.

In our experience, the following strategies/activities are helpful in addressing such implementation-level challenges.

1. In cases where the government lacks funds to implement large scale reading programs, engage with relevant officials to discuss cost effective options. Libraries for a group of schools (cluster libraries) or classroom libraries can be less cost intensive than standalone libraries. Re-usable student books are more cost-efficient than workbooks. Using technology can substantially reduce training costs.
2. In case printing and distribution of materials are a challenge, engage with governments to design effective supply and distribution channels that can address this problem. This can include engagement of private printers and couriers in cases where these functions are currently performed only by government bodies.
3. Ensuring availability of local story books in schools might need working with publishers to make the books available in the local markets while also working with school authorities to remove bottlenecks in procurement of the appropriate books.
4. Effective teacher training and coaching are key to success on a scale. However, efforts need to go beyond just developing good training content. The entire teacher training cascade should be designed to ensure minimum dilution of training inputs. This requires rigorous training of master trainers and detailed training plans and manuals for training down the cascade. Additional digital nudges should be designed to prevent loss of training quality. Finally, pre-post assessments at all levels of training would help measure training fidelity.
5. Coaching and on-site support to teachers have been the most challenging to ensure while implementing through government systems. In most cases, government coaches/academic monitors do not exist, or are hugely overstretched leading to little or no on-site support for teachers. In case it is not financially viable for the government to provide dedicated coaching staff, discuss and pilot alternative options like training headteachers and middle-tier officials to perform coaching duties, engaging academic institutions and universities, peer-coaching options, and/or use of technology-assisted coaching.
6. Mid-level actors, both on the academic and administrative side, help in sustaining reform efforts in the event of quick political changes and policy flip-flops. Scale-up efforts should therefore identify such mid-level actors and specially focus on their engagement and capacity building, so that they can take ownership and lead the reform process closer to the school level.
7. A strong monitoring, review and assessment system is the backbone of large-scale implementation, and a major challenge in most government-led projects. This includes regular formative and summative assessments, review at various levels of the government based on these assessments, and necessary corrective actions. Engage with government on these issues and support them in designing a strong system that makes monitoring pedagogically meaningful, digitally anchored and institutionally owned.

On the overall, it is important to engage with the entire ecosystem to drive system change.

Sustaining implementation at scale

For scale up efforts to be sustainable, responsibilities (both design and implementation) need to be shifted to government systems and other stakeholders. Systemic reforms need to be institutionalized within government structures, frameworks and routines, and budget lines The following strategies support long-term sustainability.

1. Effective transfer of knowledge to government is key to sustainable system change. This involves building capacity of institutions and personnel across the government system (national – provincial – local). However, this effort needs to be approached with sensitivity and should not come across ‘telling’ govt staff on what is best for them! Co-creation of content, as explained above, is often an effective strategy to initiate transfer of knowledge.
2. A phased approach of demonstration, collaboration and expansion has been found to be an effective strategy for gradual release of responsibility and ownership to government stakeholders. The middle collaboration phase, with active government participation, allows program reforms on a limited scale (district/province) with necessary tweaks to the design before full scale implementation.
3. Foundational learning extends beyond the school into homes and communities. Active engagement with parents, volunteers and communities, in terms of time, oversight and financial contribution, not only reinforces school efforts but also helps create a demand for systemic reforms.
4. Collaborations across government, NGOs, universities and development partners expand technical capacity, distribute leadership, reduce dependency on a single actor, enhance legitimacy and create a shared sense of ownership.
5. Finally, sustained learning improvement is possible only when teachers move from being passive recipients of guidance/training to being involved in contextual adaptation, thereby strengthening feedback loops and enhancing teacher agency. Teacher agency fosters ownership and ensures classroom relevance.

The above learnings, though emanating from Room to Read’s experience of working at scale, can be helpful for all organizations wanting to scale-up their interventions through government systems.