This is my eighteenth year working in Tanzania. ASAP’s too — we grew up together. Which means we’re both officially adults now. So naturally, it’s time for a more focused and ambitious next chapter.

We are strengthening the strategy, partnerships, and operating systems needed to grow responsibly, sharpening our priorities around teacher support, girls’ education, early learning, and a model of school development built with communities and government from the beginning.

This is an exciting moment for ASAP. It is also a moment that requires discipline.

Growth cannot simply mean doing more. It has to mean building better: clearer systems, stronger partnerships, better evidence, deeper local ownership, and a model that can expand without losing the trust and relationships that make the work effective.

A classroom is easy to explain. A dormitory is easy to explain. A teacher training program is easy to explain. Each of those investments can be important, and ASAP has supported all of them in different ways over the years.

But after years of working inside Tanzania’s public education system, we have learned that education does not improve because of one input alone.

Students learn when the conditions around them begin to work together.

Teachers need support, tools, training, and motivation. Girls need safety, stability, health education, mentorship, and time to focus on school. Communities need to be active partners. Government needs to be engaged from the beginning. Schools need infrastructure, but they also need leadership, resources, and systems that can sustain progress after a project is complete.

That kind of work is harder to explain. It is harder to fund. It is harder to measure in a simple line. But it is much closer to the kind of work that lasts.

The Gap

What We Know vs. What We Fund

In education, there is broad agreement that learning depends on systems. Most people who have spent time in schools understand this intuitively. Students do not learn in isolation from their health, safety, home life, teachers, school leadership, and community context.

And yet, much of what gets funded and implemented remains fragmented.

Funding often flows toward narrow, single-issue interventions: a classroom block here, a WASH project there, a training program somewhere else. These investments may address real needs, but when they are delivered without the full suite of conditions around them, they rarely add up to the kind of durable change students and schools need.

We have seen this firsthand. A funder may be willing to support classroom construction, but not the teacher support, learning materials, student wellbeing programs, or community governance structures that determine whether those classrooms actually improve learning. A project may increase enrollment or attendance, but if students are hungry, unsafe, unsupported, or unable to study at home, learning outcomes may still stall. A training may improve teacher knowledge, but if teachers are isolated, under-resourced, or frequently rotated, gains can be fragile.

The problem is not that single interventions are useless. Many are necessary. The problem is that they are rarely sufficient.

In low-resource public education systems, the binding constraints on learning are rarely singular. When one condition improves but others remain weak, progress is often partial, expensive, or temporary.

That is the hard truth we have had to confront in our own work. The honest reality is that ASAP has not always been immune to this pressure. For much of our history, we implemented the right components but often in pieces — not because we believed fragmented delivery was enough, but because that is often what gets resourced.

Each intervention addressed a real need. But delivered without a cohesive system around them, even the right interventions could only produce partial, fragile change.

We have always known this. The question we are now determined to answer is how to deliver the integrated model we have always believed in, at greater reach, with stronger evidence, and in a form that communities and government can sustain.

Oxford & Skoll

A Question Sharpened in Oxford

Last month, I was in Oxford during the week of the Skoll World Forum, joining meetings, side events, and conversations around The Sidebar, Marmalade Festival, and the broader gathering of social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and development practitioners that forms around one of the most important annual convenings in global social impact.

I entered those conversations with questions I keep returning to in this work: how do we build durable organizations, how do we strengthen public systems without creating parallel structures, how do we shift more ownership toward local leadership and government, and how do we support girls through the connected realities of health, dignity, education, safety, and agency?

What struck me was a productive tension that surfaced across nearly every conversation — one that Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation sharpened considerably in several sessions he hosted at Skoll that week, and in a new essay published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review at the same time.

Starr is one of the clearest thinkers on scale in the social sector. His eight-word mission statement discipline (verb, target, outcome, no jargon) is designed to force the kind of clarity that actually travels through public systems. And in Scale Really Matters, his most recent SSIR essay, he distinguishes three kinds of organizations: those with steady local impact, those on a linear growth trajectory, and those pursuing exponential scale through government adoption and delivery.

The challenge his framework poses is one I keep returning to. If you ask me to describe ASAP’s work in eight words, I can get close: Help girls complete secondary school in Tanzania. That is true. But it is incomplete in a way that matters. Because what actually allows a girl to complete secondary school in rural Tanzania is not one thing. It is a set of conditions that have to work together: a safe place to live, a teacher who shows up and is supported, a school community that believes her education is worth protecting, a family that has been engaged, and a government system that is invested in the outcome.

The eight-word version of the work is real. The work required to make it happen is more complicated.

ASAP is not a Mulago-style exponential scaler. But I am convinced that the integrated work we do can be made smarter, leaner, and more government-aligned — until the model itself can travel through public systems without us having to carry every piece of it. That is the work I came home from Oxford thinking harder about.

The Model

What We Are Building

This has always been at the core of ASAP’s model: building the conditions that allow schools to function, teachers to teach, and students — especially girls — to stay in school and thrive. What is different now is not the direction. It is the ambition, the resolve, and the determination to stop letting funding categories define the boundaries of what we deliver.

From our experience, the minimum conditions that must be true for a public school to reliably support learning include several connected pieces. Teachers and school leaders must be supported, motivated, and equipped. Learning environments must be safe and functional. Girls need targeted support through adolescence, when the risk of dropout increases. Families and communities must be engaged as partners, not spectators. Government must be involved from the beginning so projects strengthen public systems rather than create parallel ones.

This is why co-investment is central to our model. Every project must be built with the community and government from the outset, never delivered to them. ASAP helps mobilize donor support, manage implementation, and provide practical operational capacity. Communities contribute land, labor, materials, local coordination, oversight, and advocacy. Government helps ensure the work is integrated into the public system and positioned for long-term use.

In Practice

More Than a Construction Project

We are seeing this now at Miririni Secondary School, where construction of a new girls’ dormitory is entering its final stretch. Once complete, the dormitory will provide safe, stable housing for 120 secondary school girls.

On the surface, that is a construction project. In reality, it is much more than that.

The school community has contributed land, labor, materials, water, local coordination, student recruitment committees, and advocacy. ASAP has helped mobilize donor support and manage construction. The Tanzanian government, through district leadership, is helping ensure the dormitory can operate as part of the public school system — including furnishing the dormitory and helping put key operational support in place.

When donors, communities, and government each invest meaningfully, a project is not simply delivered. It is owned locally, cared for, and built to last.

Kupanda Project

The System Around a Girl

The same logic shapes the Kupanda Project, ASAP’s girls’ education program. Kupanda does not assume that one intervention is enough to carry a girl through adolescence. It brings together life skills education, health and wellbeing support, leadership development, STEM programming, menstrual health education, mentorship, and safe housing where needed.

A girl may need a safe place to live. She may need menstrual health education and supplies. She may need mentorship. She may need teachers who recognize her potential. She may need a school community that believes her education is worth protecting.

If those supports are fragmented, she can still fall through the cracks. If they work together, the path becomes stronger.

But girls do not thrive in isolation from the schools around them. Strong girls’ education depends on strong schools. Strong schools depend on supported teachers. These are not separate investments. They are the same investment, made in the same place, at the same time.

Growth vs. Scale

Preparing to Grow Responsibly

Growth can mean doing more ourselves. Scale requires something different: helping the right actors — especially government — own and carry the work forward. If we simply build more projects that depend on us forever, we have grown, but we have not truly scaled.

The goal is not for ASAP to become a larger institution that does everything everywhere. The goal is to find the leanest, most effective version of our integrated model: the one that delivers the full suite of conditions students need, in a form that communities can own and government can adopt and sustain. Not a simplified version of the work. A smarter one.

That requires depth where deep investment is needed, and lighter support — shared resources, training, peer learning — where those can travel across networks of schools. It requires teachers, girls, families, and local leaders treated not as beneficiaries of a project, but as the people who will carry the work forward.

And it requires ASAP to become a stronger organization. We have the model. What we are building now is everything around it that allows it to go further: clearer systems, better data, stronger partnerships, more disciplined planning, and a resource base that can support not just individual projects, but the organizational capacity needed to make those projects work well and last.

Questions I’m Working Through

These are not abstract questions. They will determine whether organizations like ASAP can move from strong local impact to something more scalable, more durable, and more useful to public systems. Answering them will require the right partners, patient funding, and honest learning.