Jacobs Foundation

Our Mission

By 2020, we aim to have become the key organization linking excellent research with improving, globally, the development of children and young people under the age of 12. That means focussing our efforts on effective implementation, dialogue and advocacy. As a research-informed organization, we will base our funding decisions on solid evidence and will use comprehensive approaches to secure systemic change.

Three big themes

We are focussing on three big themes. Our first priority, “Science of Learning”, is to fund new research into how individual children can learn better.
Our second priority theme is “Early Childhood Education and Care”. This focusses on developing exemplary best practice in the northern hemisphere, in Switzerland and Germany, with the learning disseminated to other European countries.
Our third theme looks to the African continent where we will support improvements in “Rural Livelihoods” in Ivory Coast, whose benefits will be shared with other West African countries.

Worldwide network

We have established a worldwide network of the most talented people in child and youth development. Linking researchers, journalists, practitioners, social entrepreneurs and politicians will strengthen our alumni activities. Strategic partnerships with institutions from the private and public sector will help us to increase the effectiveness of our programs.

Leveraging impact

Furthermore, we aim to leverage our impact and our core funding by encouraging co-investments, by using impact investment finance and by harnessing all our skills to provide services. We will use our highly regarded reputation and brand to target communications in ways that help key people to make the most of learning from our projects and initiatives.

Learning organization

The knowledge sharing starts with us—we are a learning organization with an agile management culture. We actively manage knowledge. We are keen to experiment and learn from successes, failures and feedback. The Jacobs Foundation seeks to be a partner of choice within the Third Sector.