2025 was a challenging year to be developing innovation in the context of international development. The year started with the abrupt USAID shut down; the termination of funding flows caused immediate shockwaves through the entire sector. We were less affected than many, but the knock-on effects were still conspicuous as attention and funding pools were redirected to cover gaps. It had important consequences for IDEMS, expediting our decision to step into a strategic direction we were preparing for and yet had intended to pursue more slowly. Specifically, we realized we could no longer depend on adequately grant-funded collaborations with impact deliverables as the primary context in which to develop our original enabling technology and innovative digital programmes. For the directors, funding realities catalysed a strategic decision to focus more of our internal efforts and resources on our own innovation, with the goal of stepping out from behind our collaborative partners and into our own position as an innovative social enterprise developing novel and genuinely pioneering technology for public good. We also recognised that, in a technology context, the timing was right for our work in ways it hadn’t previously been, thanks to advances in the field of AI that we had been anticipating and preparing for.
This context defined 2025: IDEMS began doing the internal groundwork to step into our tech startup phase. We recognised that this required us to convert our learning, work, and often “under-the-hood” socio-technical innovation – already delivering, and even scaling, impact in our collaborations – into clearly defined and differentiated products. We faced the unique challenge of stepping into, and carving out a new lane, in a tech funding and narrative landscape where ambitious, scale tech innovation has been defined by venture capital and its incentives. This work has involved: clearly defining the problems we are trying to solve and opportunities we are stepping into, both generally and within individual impact categories; breaking out our layers of innovation to separate and define the deep, truly groundbreaking innovation we have identified; thinking toward products and applications to understand where our team’s expertise allowed us to own both category-agnostic impact-enabling technology and original impact products with impact applications; and working toward prototype demonstrator(s) and public-facing technical repos that can highlight the potential. While we deliberately moved team, resources and effort into all three of these, this strategic shift has highlighted that these require significant investment from IDEMS and time from our team that are revealing the limitations of our existing business model. Where we were previously able to sustain a profitable business through collaborative partnerships, we now see the need for new funding to invest in our ambitious vision for competitive, public-good alternatives to existing technology. Our CIC structure presents unique challenges, and we are exploring a range of funding avenues, including taking on low-interest, patient debt to enable our team to seize this moment.
IDEMS’ vision has always been to build non-extractive digital technologies that balance expert and community ownership to enable even the most marginalized contexts to affordably, sustainably access, and continuously improve, the highest quality technology and social impact programming to tackle the hardest problems on the ground in their communities. We still struggle to articulate the full ambition but are making progress on articulating the problem in specific contexts. We are increasingly aware of the gap between the people (on the ground) who feel the pain of not having technology serving them and the people (with the programmes and/or funds) who understand the technological challenges and barriers deeply enough to differentiate between implementation approaches.
Even as we step into the “tech startup” opportunity, our collaborative partners are a defining, differentiating lane of our work. These have been, and will continue to be, an essential part of how we develop technology for social good. The diversity of our existing partnerships has helped us to identify the foundational innovation which could transform the socio-technical relationships across all our collaborations. However these collaborations have also highlighted how difficult it is for even our close partners to assess what we are building vs. other technical implementations. This is a common problem across all deeply technical innovation: Only a narrow set of mathematical science experts are qualified to assess the differentiating technical merits of innovation, in particular while it is still in the early stages of development. In mainstream commercial tech, venture capital investment is most often the early signal of validation. As a not-for-profit social enterprise, we can’t rely on the same signals. This has contributed to our decision to develop a defensive IP strategy, which includes patenting our foundational innovation to clearly demonstrate the inventiveness of our approach. Commercial licensing or application could make patents a revenue stream in their own right.
We also recognise that we can’t help a broader audience understand the value of our underlying innovation(s) unless they are seeing it/them at work in an applied context. To build out a prototype of the foundational, agnostic innovation, we recognize the need to implement in a bounded impact category, where our team holds both technical and subject-matter expertise, networks and credibility. We identified STEM education as a multifaceted strategic opportunity:
- In statistics and data science digital textbooks, there is 1) an emerging urgent need and where the high-quality, open resources, which provide the foundations of our innovative model, already exist and 2) our team has world-leading prestige and expertise.
- In mathematics education, 1) there is an acute, well-known, and generationally defining need for resources that align with new competency-based curriculums (CBCs) that are being rolled out across the continent, 2) we have developed a community of top university mathematics educators who are already skilled in using STACK online assessment for educator-led resource development enabled, and 3) these same partners have the expertise and are often positioned to lead the development of the open textbooks that align with national-level CBCs that will be the foundations of our novel model of open, adaptive digital textbooks, with embedded teaching, learning and assessment resources
We enter 2026 committed to building on IDEMS’ strong foundation by also becoming a social enterprise technology startup, creating world-changing tech for public benefit. This year is the second time IDEMS has not been in profit. Early in the year, we would have attributed it to the global situation, but by the end of the year it was clearly the result of our internal prioritisation and decision to invest in ourselves to reduce our dependencies on the development sector, and step towards developing our own product funding and revenue streams. This led to a decline in income, without a corresponding decline in expenditure. All areas of our work are continuing with our partners continuing to find success despite the challenging year we have all had.