Funda Wande through the Lens of PDIA: Showcasing a Flexible and Iterative Learning Approach to Improving Educational Outcomes

2022 | RISE Insight Note

Salimah Samji and Mansi Kapoor

Key Points

• The case of Funda Wande, an education-focused NGO committed to overcoming the learning crisis in South Africa, is an illustration of how the principles that underlie PDIA can help practitioners and policy implementers in the education sector create change and improve learning outcomes.
• Developing deep and regular engagements with multiple agents across the education sector, including government at the district, province, and national level, can ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, and relevant.
• Building collaborative, inclusive teams that have local contextual knowledge, and bring different perspectives, allows for a robust understanding of the problem, and improves the design of interventions.
• Flexible and iterative learning approaches facilitate the search for context appropriate solutions to improving learning outcomes.

Introduction

Funda Wande is an organisation founded in 2017 with the goal of ensuring all students in South Africa can read for meaning and calculate with confidence in their home language by the age of 10.¹ It develops curricula, videos, and print materials to train teachers in the fundamentals of foundational learning.

Funda Wande has adopted a ‘learning by doing’ strategy that is similar to the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach to solving complex problems. PDIA is a high-impact process of innovation that helps organisations develop the capability to solve complex problems while they are solving such problems. It is a step-by-step framework that helps break down problems into their root causes, identify entry points, search for possible solutions, take action, reflect upon what is learned, adapt, and then act again. Its dynamic process and tight feedback loops enable teams to find and fit solutions to the local context.²

PDIA is gaining traction in development circles amongst practitioners as well as funders. However, many do not fully understand all the components and how they work in concert to produce results in practice. Though the Funda Wande team did not intentionally deploy the PDIA approach in their work, many features of their journey reflect the principles of PDIA. This case study is an attempt to map Funda Wande’s learning journey to core PDIA principles and tools to help programme designers and implementers better understand its application in the education sector. It can also be used in the classroom to teach PDIA.

This case provides a narrative of the Funda Wande story with boxes illustrating how PDIA principles and tools like problem construction, deconstruction, entry point analysis, iteration, and building authorisation would have been applied in practice. The sources of this case include a literature review of education in South Africa, related research documents, and conversations with staff at Funda Wande. We are grateful to the staff of Funda Wande (Nic Spaull, Nangamso Mtsatse, Nwabisa Makaluza, Julia Maphutha, Permie Isaac), Allan Gray Foundation (Natasha Barker), and MSDF (Sean Bastable) for their generosity of sharing their time with us.

Footnotes

1 To learn more, visit Funda Wande’s website.

2 See PDIA Toolkit for details

Citation

Samji, Salimah, and Mansi Kapoor. 2022. “Funda Wande through the lens of PDIA: Showcasing a flexible and iterative learning approach to improving educational outcomes.” RISE Insight 2022/036.