When it comes to effecting tangible improvements in local or regional systems, collaborations across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors are of paramount importance. That said, many in philanthropy will recognize a familiar challenge: those vital collaborations can too often become unwieldy, slowing down progress and blurring the sightlines to lasting change.
In Colombia, for example, we have the opportunity to redress learning outcomes for children across the country. While many children are still falling short of expected learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy, there are sustained and deliberate efforts to ensure that every child has a high-quality education. Through the collaborative network Colombia Evidencia Potencial en Educación, or CEPE, we have been working with public authorities, philanthropic foundations, private sector companies, researchers, and educators to address that challenge.
This work has reinforced a lesson that will be familiar to many funders: when a system has many urgent needs and many actors around the table, maintaining focus is difficult. The temptation is to respond to everything at once, but without clear priorities, even well-designed public-private-philanthropic collaborations can become too broad to implement effectively or to generate meaningful evidence.
In our case, that meant making deliberate choices about where to focus, how to build alignment across different stakeholders, and how to create structures that could support locally grounded action over time.
Shared Intent Does Not Eliminate Tension
One challenge many funders, perhaps especially those focused on education, as we are, will recognize is that broad agreement on a goal does not automatically lead to alignment on how to get there. In collaborative efforts, especially those that bring together several actors, participants often come to the table with different priorities and definitions of success.
In our case, while there was shared commitment to improving children’s learning outcomes, some actors were more focused on reading and writing skills or socio-emotional learning, while others were more interested in technology or vocational training. The result was a familiar risk: that a coalition with genuine shared intent could still be pulled in too many directions to have any meaningful impact.
Our response was not to treat those differences as a problem to be smoothed over, but to make them visible and work through them directly. Through CEPE, that meant being explicit about trade-offs and narrowing the focus of the work — in our case around foundational literacy and numeracy and socio-emotional learning. We did this not because other priorities lacked value, but because these areas are essential building blocks for later learning and development, and because a more focused agenda made it easier to act and learn over time.
Just as importantly, that focus was not imposed externally. It was shaped through ongoing engagement with locally led groups composed of public education officials, regional civil society organizations, and other relevant actors in the system that are designed to share input on priorities. These Communities of Change consistently identified these areas as shared priorities across their regional education needs.
For funders, the takeaway is that coalition-building is not only about bringing the right people together, but also about creating the conditions for prioritization. Supporting locally grounded systems change means being willing to hold competing interests in view and protect a clear theory of progress without undermining trust. That kind of discipline can feel uncomfortable but without it, collaboration can become broad enough to attract participation while remaining too diffuse to deliver meaningful change.
Translating National Priorities Into Local Action
National priorities do not automatically translate into meaningful change on the ground. This is especially true in highly decentralized systems, where regions vary significantly in their capacities, needs, and institutional realities. Without local ownership, even well-intentioned reforms can remain more theoretical than practical.
Our response through CEPE has been to work through Communities of Change. Rather than treating local engagement as a consultation exercise, we have focused on building and strengthening regional education ecosystems that bring together public authorities, schools, universities and institutions of higher education, researchers, civil society organizations, teachers and school principals, and other stakeholders around shared priorities.
These collaborations are designed to help local leaders adapt national goals to regional contexts, while also creating a feedback loop between national and regional actors in which evidence informs planning, implementation, and decision-making over time. This matters because, too often, when evidence exists, it sits on the periphery: commissioned, documented, and discussed, but not used in real time by the people making decisions.
For us, the broader lesson is that local grounding cannot be treated as secondary to systems change. If funders want reforms to take hold, they need structures that help local actors shape priorities, act on evidence, and feed their experience back into wider system conversations. Without coordination, ownership, and evidence embedded in decision-making, it is much harder for lasting change to happen. The next question, then, is what it takes to ensure those local structures and relationships can endure over time.
Sustainability Must Be Built-In From the Start
A third challenge is sustainability. It is one thing to convene a diverse range of stakeholders around a shared agenda, and another to help that group become a functional and, eventually, independent unit.
For CEPE, a Community of Change has reached a meaningful level of maturity when it is led by a local or regional education authority and can convene actors, define priorities, mobilize resources with decreasing dependence on external support, and institutionalize education practices that improve students’ learning outcomes. In addition, it needs to have built the capacity to generate, use, and mobilize evidence to make informed decisions and learn continuously over time.
Instead of looking for new mechanisms to fund, we should ask what coordination, evidence, or incentive is missing from what already exists.
Sustainability is not only about whether initiatives endure locally, but also about shaping the wider policy environment for lasting change. It requires building public momentum and political commitment around the challenges that evidence brings to light, and engaging decision-makers who can translate learning into action. When this happens, evidence and effective practices are more likely to inform the design, revision, and monitoring of public policy, rather than remaining confined to isolated programs or technical discussions.
The Infrastructure of Systems Change
For us, one of the clearest lessons is that progress depends less on how a model looks on paper than on the quality of the relationships and results that underpin it. Building locally grounded change means working across diverse actors, balancing breadth with focus, and supporting local coalitions to become more self-sustaining.
If funders want to help improve public education systems — or other complex, multi-stakeholder systems — especially in contexts with significant regional variation, they should start with a few practical questions. What local structures already exist that can be strengthened rather than replaced? Where are national priorities failing to connect with local realities? What incentives are shaping local decision-making? And how will evidence become part of ongoing planning, rather than a box-ticking exercise for impact reporting?
Equally important is understanding existing local capacities — what must be strengthened to ensure they are long-lasting, and how to align design, financing, and advocacy with locally grounded solutions.
In our experience, community-based collaboration forms a key part of the infrastructure that enables systems change. The work is slower than many funders would like. It requires more negotiation, listening, and tolerance for ambiguity. But achieving change that is locally owned, evidence-informed, and durable is the work that is most essential.
Camilo Andrés Morales is the Country Director for Colombia at the Jacobs Foundation. Ana Cubillo is a Global Program Director for the Jacobs Foundation.
