Funda Wande through the lens of PDIA: showcasing a flexible and iterative learning approach to improving educational outcomes

Funda Wande is an organisation founded in 2017 with the goal of ensuring all students in South Africa can read for meaning and calculate with confidence in their home language by the age of 10. It develops curricula, videos, and print materials to train teachers in the fundamentals of foundational learning. Funda Wande has adopted a ‘learning by doing’ strategy that is similar to the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach to solving complex problems. PDIA is a high-impact process of innovation that helps organisations develop the capability to solve complex problems while they are solving such problems. This case study is an attempt to map Funda Wande’s learning journey to core PDIA principles and tools to help programme designers and implementers better understand its application in the education sector. It can also be used in the classroom to teach PDIA. This case provides a narrative of the Funda Wande story with boxes illustrating how PDIA principles and tools like problem construction, deconstruction, entry point analysis, iteration, and building authorisation would have been applied in practice. The sources of this case include a literature review of education in South Africa, related research documents, and conversations with staff at Funda Wande.