Joe Wolf (MBA 1999), cofounder and co-CEO of Imagine Worldwide, wants to provide educational opportunity where it is needed most.

“In the next 30 years, half of the world’s youth will be sub-Saharan African,” says Wolf. “Right now, the World Bank reports that only one out of 10 kids [there] can read with comprehension. If you play out the next 30 years, something really significant needs to change for the whole world not to be hugely impacted by the lack of resources in this region. You need to find solutions that can work outside the status quo.”

As cofounder of The Learning Accelerator and Open Up Resources, two successful nonprofits focused on innovation in the K–12 education market in the United States, Wolf knew how to deliver scalable, outside-the-box educational services for American kids. He believes his latest venture can solve the literacy and numeracy crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.

Imagine Worldwide is currently executing a country-wide rollout to transform Malawi’s primary school system and aims to replicate that success in other nations in the area. Some 6,000 primary schools serve 3.8 million students in Malawi; by 2030, Imagine Worldwide intends to reach all of those schools. Next up is expansion into Sierra Leone, where 5,600 primary schools serve nearly 2 million children.

“The solutions that we work with are particularly well-suited for the systemic challenges in sub-Saharan Africa: very large class sizes; huge teacher training and availability issues; lack of instructional materials; and lack of electricity and basic infrastructure,” Wolf explains.

The model is simple yet compelling: The nonprofit partners with national and local government, and hires and trains local employees. Primary schools are supplied tablets that run on solar power. The power comes from infrastructure that the nonprofit and its local partners install, which provides jobs and benefits communities as well as schools. “We focus on country-wide rollouts where philanthropy and aid fund initial infrastructure and scale, strengthening government systems so they can sustainably operate and fund the program long term,” Wolf says.

The tablets Imagine Worldwide distributes do not require internet connectivity. Each is loaded with a full, culturally appropriate curriculum developed by the organization’s software partner—the nonprofit onebillion—with children learning at their own pace. Each tablet is used by an average of five students per day and supplements teacher instruction. Data from the tablets fuels continuous improvement of the software and tracks student progress. The annual cost per child is less than $7—and going down.

Beginning with randomized controlled trials in 2017, Imagine Worldwide initially reached a few thousand children in Malawi. By 2023, that number had risen to 300,000. They aim to serve “nearly a million kids next year and 10 million kids in the next five years,” says Wolf.

The ripple effect will be astonishing, he believes. “If you look at literacy rates, they are directly correlated to every other social outcome that we care about as a society: Kids will live longer, and they will take better care of themselves and better care of the environment. They’ll make more money. And the benefits will be multigenerational. The conditions are set for massive positive impact, and the demand is there; the only real impediment is bold philanthropy,” Wolf says.

At HBS, Wolf studied with Clayton Christensen, whose theory of disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service begins with simple applications at the bottom of a market and then moves up. “His theory has very much shaped what I have chosen to do with the second part of my life,” observes Wolf, a former Goldman Sachs analyst. “Those that are given opportunity via education can transform their lives, and those that can’t have a real challenge. Talent is universal but opportunity is not.”

Board member Michael Horn (MBA 2006) says that Imagine Worldwide is “the purest example of Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory in action. When you think about really transforming education, the theory of disruptive innovation says you have to go to areas where the alternative is nothing at all.”

Wolf hopes that other entrepreneurs will focus their expertise on solving global problems. “I think this generation that’s graduating from business school doesn’t want to just take the job that pays the highest amount,” he notes. “They want to do something that helps feed the soul and contributes to the world. All the metrics that I learned in the for-profit world as an investor—return on invested capital, thinking about how you scale—are alive and well, every day, when you run an enterprise that’s focused on the most marginalized children in the world.”

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