Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS) – Scaling Up and Up

After going through a rigorous due diligence process (cf VPF) with the Department for International Development, PEAS has been accepted as a beneficiary of the UK Government’s ‘UK Aid Match’ scheme. As a result, they are launching ‘Back to School’, by far their biggest ever publicity campaign.

This is a success for VPF, because VPF grant money was used to hire a specialist staff member to improve the monitoring, evaluation and reporting of PEAS’ impact, providing data without which PEAS would not have been able to access UK government funding. To this active unrestricted funding, VPF added some essential pro bono strategic planning advice from Oliver Wyman, and the connection (the Danson Foundation) through which PEAS managed to secure (on top of significant further funding) a campaign communications partner with the capacity to generate 400,000 opportunities to view the campaign (Progressive Digital Media), another prerequisite of acceptance onto the UK Aid Match scheme. Such a mix of funding (to leverage more funding), expertise and access to networks is what VPF was set up to provide, and PEAS’ success with DfID is a powerful example of the potential of the venture philanthropy model.

Their appeal runs from 14 September to 13 December and is targeting £500,000 in donations, which will be matched from the overseas aid budget to £1 million. This will ensure that 16,000 secondary school students enrolled in PEAS schools over the next three years recieve a quality and relevant secondary education. and massively boost PEAS’ profile, its network of individual supporters, and its future fundraising capacity.

Click here to see the PEAS’ campaign video.