The Pestalozzi Children's Foundation is convinced that innovation can help to achieve development goals faster and more cost-effectively. For this reason, 2023 it set up the Innovation Fund to promote and test promising project ideas. The winners of 2025 were chosen at the end of April.
A total of 14 organisations from nine countries and four continents applied for the Innovation Fund this year. The approaches ranged from school gardens as interdisciplinary learning laboratories to digital learning platforms for multilingual teaching and trauma pedagogy in conflict areas.
Innovation Fund 2025: The winners
In a multi-stage decision-making process, the 7-member jury selected two projects as winners:
- The Macedonian Civic Education Centre (MCEC) from North Macedonia plans to develop digital learning games and playful activities to help pupils develop a so-called growth mindset. This playful approach is intended to promote perseverance, encourage them to try out new strategies and inspire them to see failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
- The Guatemalan Organisación de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI) will develop toolboxes for creative writing. These toolboxes for 4th to 6th grade will support teachers in implementing them in the classroom and improve pupils' creative writing skills in the long term.
How the concept works
The innovation projects go through four phases based on the design thinking process: Ideation, prototyping, testing and normalisation. Phase one is completed with the submitted project proposals. In this phase, the local organisations have analysed the target groups and their needs, identified a problem to be solved and presented their innovative solution approach accordingly.
The three-month prototype phase, in which a simple and easy-to-implement version of the idea is trialled in order to gain a better understanding of the limits of the solution and the associated problems, begins in August.
In the testing phase, which lasts a maximum of 9 months, the complete product is tested, taking into account the key findings of the prototype phase. If an innovation proves to be successful and scalable, it can be transferred to a regular project of the Pestalozzi Children's Foundation as part of the normalisation phase.
Concrete quality development in the education sector
The results of the first few years have underlined the enormous potential that lies in the many partner organisations worldwide when it comes to tackling specific local problems and needs in a cost-effective manner.
For example, the Serbian Centre for Interactive Pedagogy (CIP) has developed software as part of the Innovation Fund that simplifies self-evaluation, enables data-based school management and improves cooperation with education authorities.
The digital tool called "Self-Evaluation for Quality Improvement" is also a very good example in terms of scalability: the tool is available free of charge to all schools in the country on the website of the Ministry of Education.