Rising Academies

Rising Academies seeks to open doors and change lives through a network of low-cost, quality-focused private schools that it owns and operates in Sub-Saharan Africa. It then shares its learnings around innovative curriculum, intensive teacher coaching, and actionable data with governments and other partners to improve the quality of their schools at scale. 

While the number of children attending school in developing countries is higher than ever, the education they receive is often far from adequate. In fact, a staggering four out of five children and young adolescents attending school in Africa—133 million in total—are not acquiring basic math and reading skills. Girls, in particular, experience low learning gains.

The danger of failing to adequately educate children is compounded by the ongoing climate crisis. Education reduces poverty, improves health, and raises living standards, all of which can help in the individual and collective effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change. At the same time, climate change threatens education. Indeed, some experts believe that climate crises will soon end schooling for more than 12 million girls in 30 climate vulnerable countries every year, with 22 of these countries in Africa. The impact of climate change makes Rising Academies’ efforts to improve how teachers teach and students learn ever more essential. 

As of 2023, Rising Academies was educating more than 250,000 students in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana at low-cost private schools it manages directly and through partnership schools run in collaboration with governments. Teachers at Rising schools receive extensive training on how to deliver quality lessons and follow a rigorous curriculum. Independent evaluations have found that Rising students make learning gains two to three times larger than peers in comparable schools; indeed, Rising has become one of the top-performing operators in the LEAP program, in which the Liberian Ministry of Education contracts with private organizations to operate selected public schools. The Rising network collects extensive data about what methods work best and shares the results with governments and other education organizations in order to improve learning for students in all schools.

King Philanthropies support of Rising Academies helps it to bring its high-quality, low-cost education to more people.