What distinguishes the innovations in the 2026 HundrED Global Collection is not only their impact, but their ability to grow by confronting obstacles - financial, technical, linguistic, and emotional - while remaining deeply grounded in local realities.
Three innovations from the Global Collection - Notopedia, iLearnabout, and Switch4Schools - provide glowing examples of how scaling succeeds when design and delivery remain sensitive to context. Each tackles a different dimension of educational inequity: access to exam preparation, access to relevant learning content in low-resource environments, and access to social–emotional tools that help both students and teachers navigate the human complexity of schools. Together, they offer ten lessons for building solutions that travel well because they are rooted in the needs of specific communities.
Diagnosing the “Why” – Precision and Systemic Support in Digital Education
Scaling across contexts is difficult. Innovations that thrive with strong infrastructure can struggle where demands - whether internal or external - require shifts in design, delivery, or even purpose. Exam-driven education systems exemplify this challenge.
Many countries rely on high-stakes testing to determine access to higher education, professional certification, and social mobility. Families frequently respond by investing in tutoring, cram schools, and intensive independent study. India, with nearly 250 million students and a multibillion-dollar coaching industry, reflects this dynamic sharply. For marginalised students, this financial divide becomes a systemic barrier long before they walk into an exam hall - exactly the inequity Notopedia was designed to dismantle.
“In a region that holds a quarter of the world’s population, even a small shift in access creates a seismic shift in opportunity and destiny. Our work is to move nations by empowering their learners,” shares Notopedia's founder Amand Shukla.
How Notopedia Goes About It
Notopedia’s model for scale is built entirely on accessibility and affordability:
- Financial Equity: A nonprofit, completely free, and multilingual digital platform offering structured preparation for more than 400 exams and 14 school boards, ensuring nationwide reach.
- Technical Accessibility: A clean, simple interface optimized for low-network environments and entry-level devices, with strong local language support - an essential driver of academic success.
- Organic Scaling: Over 5 million learners reached through community engagement, partnerships, and word-of-mouth - without spending on advertising - ensuring the platform grows where it is most needed.
The HundrED Academy has noted its strong contextual alignment. As one reviewer put it:
“Great impact proving that one size doesn’t fit all… built for the unheard, the unseen, the underserved, across several settings of formal learning and free of charge which makes it accessible to almost all.”
Contextualising Content and Infrastructure
For organisations operating in low-resource environments, innovation must solve practical, physical barriers such as inadequate power, limited connectivity, or lack of learning materials. iLearnabout - which provides free, generic conservation education across Sub-Saharan Africa - was shaped directly by these conditions.
For organizations operating in low-resource environments, innovation must solve practical, physical barriers such as inadequate power, limited connectivity, or lack of learning materials. iLearnabout - which provides “free, generic conservation education” across Sub-Saharan Africa - was shaped directly by these conditions.
iLearnabout's conservation curricula is tailored to rural African contexts.
As founder Ian McFadyen notes, in many rural communities “there is a huge shortfall in books and teaching materials… So for me going digital is a very logical way forward,” though governments often cannot afford the needed hardware. iLearnabout bridges that gap through technical, contextual, and curricular adaptation.
How iLearnabout Operates in Low-Resource Contexts
- Offline Operation: All content works offline on low-cost Android smartphones, enabling teachers to use the platform anywhere once downloaded, with no further barriers.
- Smart Partnerships: Many systems already have tablets or computers funded through grants but lack appropriate content. iLearnabout fills this gap by offering its lessons, challenges, and practical projects and quizzes for free. As Anne Tudor explains, they also provide “resources, training and IT backup, which means they can use those resources to do the good work that they need to do.”
- Contextual Relevance: Content is tailored “very deliberately for rural Africa,” says Ian. Existing conservation materials were outdated and based on European landscapes and schemas. iLearnabout instead mirrors local biomes, uses accessible language, and incorporates a range of topics including financial literacy after partners highlighted that economic security is integral to conservation decision-making.
Cultivating Emotional Intelligence and Adaptive Practice
Infrastructure and content are essential, but scaling also depends on human dynamics - the relationships, emotions, and decision-making processes shaping everyday school life. Switch4Schools focuses on this human side, scaling a whole-school emotional intelligence (EQ) approach grounded in the universality of emotional experience.
The emotion wheel lies at the heart of Switch4Schools' approach to SEL.
Founder Phil Slade emphasises that “schools all around the world are remarkably similar” in their interpersonal patterns, making EQ a powerful entry point for global adaptation.
Switch4Schools: Scaling Resilience Through Universal Human Dynamics
Phil Slade attributes the program’s resonance across contexts to three key drivers:
- Structured Framework: The Emotion Wheel categorizes feelings into five levels of intensity, destigmatizing emotions and reframing them as controllable “superpowers.” Digitization enables scalable data collection and reduces reliance on school-based psychologists.
- Linguistic and Cultural Adaptation: As the program scales into Mandarin, Hindi, Farsi, Spanish, and more, the team must navigate languages that lack precise terms for emotional gradation. The solution often involves “creating new meaning for old words” or introducing new scientific concepts about emotion.
- Teacher Empowerment: The model supports consistency without rigidity. Phil describes it “like writing for a jazz band rather than an orchestra” - teachers maintain fidelity while adapting to their own rhythms and contexts. A dedicated well-being portal further encourages teachers to practice and role-model EQ.
Adapting Strategies for Systemic Scale
Scaling is not solely about expanding user numbers; it requires organizational learning, political alignment, and sustainable institutional partnerships.
- iLearnabout strengthens institutional capacity by offering resources free of charge to NGOs and schools, enabling them to reallocate funds. This allows for exponential scale, reaching hundreds of thousands of children across 58 countries. The program’s generic yet high-quality design has already allowed adoption across diverse contexts, including in Nepal where no alternatives existed.
- Notopedia embeds itself through collaborations with government entities, educational NGOs, and CSR-backed initiatives, integrating exam-prep access directly into public systems.
- Switch for Schools advances through principal networks, education conferences, and word-of-mouth, where school leaders can see the program’s practical impact firsthand.
Together, these innovative education solutions demonstrate that meaningful scale emerges not from replicating a single model, but from tailoring strategies to the contours of real-world contexts. Each innovation confronts a different systemic barrier - financial inequity, infrastructural scarcity, and emotional complexity - and responds with designs shaped by the communities they serve.
What they share is a commitment to reducing barriers while deepening relevance. Their approaches reveal that scale is sustainable when innovations are flexible enough to adapt yet principled enough to remain coherent. As education systems continue to face widening inequities and rapidly shifting demands, these three models offer powerful lessons: build for access, build for context, build for people - and scale will follow.
Curious about more innovations from the 2026 Global Collection? Learn more here!
