Localisation In Practice: From STIR Education To Ed Impact Africa Foundation

Localisation In Practice: From STIR Education To Ed Impact Africa Foundation

STIR Education is an international NGO, headquartered in the UK, that has worked since 2012 to help education systems reignite intrinsic motivation, so that every child, teacher and official is motivated to learn and improve. Over that time it built country programmes in Uganda, India, Ethiopia and Indonesia, and supported further education interventions in Ghana, Brazil and Kenya, learning and adapting its model across very different contexts.

As part of a deliberate localisation strategy, STIR Education has spent the last several years helping its country chapters become independent, locally governed entities. STIR Education India localised first, becoming the Centre for Intrinsic Motivation in 2024. STIR Education Uganda started its own localisation journey in January 2026 to become Ed Impact Africa Foundation, and STIR Education Indonesia is scheduled to begin its transition in 2027.

Ed Impact Africa Foundation inherits STIR Education Uganda's theory of change, its national-scale programme reach, and the government and school relationships built over a decade of implementation. Concretely, that means a footprint across all local governments in the secondary education subsector and more than half of local governments in the primary subsector, delivered through our partnership with the Association of Secondary School Headteachers of Uganda for secondary schools, and through the National Association of Municipal, District and City Education Officers and the Uganda National Inspectors of Schools Association for primary, reaching 22 of Uganda's 23 core Primary Teacher Colleges.

What changes is governance, not substance. We are moving from being a branch office of a global entity to an autonomous local organisation with our own board of directors and leadership team, and from programme-based work to a stronger social enterprise model that can sustain this work locally. What stays the same is the commitment behind it: 199,856 teachers and 5,892,477 learners already reached, and a model built to keep working long after any single programme cycle ends.