In 2000, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals identified one of the biggest challenges to education as simply getting students into classrooms. Back then, nearly one in five children didn’t attend school. Today, in less than two decades, targeted intervention and political will have halved the number of children who aren’t in school, and the percentage of children who are has reached 90% worldwide.

Too many students, though, still aren’t acquiring basic skills. Some 130 million children complete four years of school without learning to read, or add and subtract. In India, for instance, roughly half of all Year 6 children can’t read a Year 3 text or perform a two-digit subtraction problem. In Brazil, only one in ten secondary school graduates performs at their corresponding level in maths.

These gaps in student learning, which are reflected in places all around the world, stem from a host of challenges: students lacking materials at their reading level or in their mother tongue; teachers who lack the tools that they need to succeed; and children who can’t get to school because they’re stuck in a conflict zone, to name just a few.

Google has long believed that technology has a vital role to play in tackling these and other educational challenges; it can get more books to students, more lesson plans to teachers and classrooms to children who can't get there themselves.

Butunevenly applied technology only worsens disparities in access and opportunity. In prosperous communities, the Internet delivers ever-richer learning experiences. But as children in this wired world enjoy online videos, digital tutors and virtual reality, less fortunate students all around the globe are falling ever further behind.

At Google.org, our approach to education is to find the most promising nonprofits and put the best of Google – our philanthropy, our people, our products – to work helping them close this worldwide gap in learning and academic opportunity.

In 2016, Google.org launched a new initiative to give £40 million to organisations that are using technology to solve some of the trickiest parts of this problem in a scalable way.

Google has never taken a conventional approach to solving problems, and neither does Google.org. When we support an organisation, we commit more than just our funding – we bring these grantees into the company and give them access to our best thinkers. Google engineers volunteer their skills and time to help our grantees take their products to the next level, and Google provides products and tools to help them scale solutions. And, always, we share what we learn with the rest of the nonprofit sector; we believe that technology solutions that can help anyone ought to belong to everyone.

Around the world, students in low-income communities have to learn with less: fewer books, out-of-date texts and materials that are culturally irrelevant or even in the wrong language. Technology can bypass the geographic and financial boundaries that can block educational resources from reaching students, while also making those resources more engaging, interactive and effective.

One of our first grantees in this area is the Foundation for Learning Equality, which is building free open-source software to bring online materials – including books, video tutorials and quizzes – to the 4.3 billion people who lack consistent access to the Internet. Their new platform, Kolibri, runs on numerous devices, from repurposed desktop computers to low-cost, off-the-shelf file storage drives, and helps educators access, organise and customise digital content, even in the most remote locations. So far they’ve taken 7,000 videos and 26,000 interactive exercises offline for students in about 160 countries.

Our funding, along with Google volunteers providing technical support, will help Learning Equality build a bigger content library and scale their reach to hundreds of thousands of new students. This summer, Google engineers and product experts are volunteering to spend four weeks working side by side with Learning Equality’s product team in areas such as UX/UI, content integration and video compression technology.

It’s no surprise that having a great teacher is one of the best predictors of a student’s academic success. In many countries there simply aren’t enough of them. By 2030, India alone will need 3 million new primary school teachers just to keep up with its growing population of students.

But great teaching isn’t just a numbers game; too often, teachers are burdened with large class sizes, infrequent training, rigid, creativity-stifling curricula and even simple isolation.

Technology can make it easier. Google.org is helping local leaders invest in digital tools that offer teachers quality training and confidence-building tools that encourage creativity in the classroom. The first of these grants goes to Million Sparks Foundation’s ChalkLit, an app-based platform that combines bite-sized, curriculum-aligned content with an online community to support high-calibre teachers and promote first-rate teaching. Google engineers volunteering their time and skills will advise the Million Sparks team on how to optimise the ChalkLit app for use by teachers in low-bandwidth and offline environments.

While more children than ever are attending school, 32 million primary school-aged students can’t reach traditional classrooms because of violent conflict and displacement. Quality primary education is especially important to children who, living in camps or other hard-to-reach settings, are highly vulnerable to poverty and exploitative labour.

One interesting approach to this problem comes from Google.org grantee War Child Holland, whose game-based method, Can’t Wait To Learn, helps keep displaced children from falling behind by reaching them with a full year of lessons and exercises that align with a host country’s curriculum.

Data collected from Can’t Wait To Learn’s first deployments in Sudan showed students significantly learning from the game, with boys and girls gaining equally, and those who knew the least, learning the most. Supported by Google product experts who are volunteering to help them build their product roadmap and expand their tech team, War Child Holland aims to reach one million students in the next five years.

The solutions that we’re testing don’t come fully formed and guaranteed to succeed. Our initiatives are carefully considered bets on seasoned innovators, and we plan to measure our progress to inform our work’s trajectory, and share our results to ensure that everyone can learn along with us.

Stay tuned for updates about our success and lessons learned along the way.