What Role Can Business Play in Education

On July 7, Raison held a webinar together with Teach For Qazaqstan and McKinsey. The speakers were Gulnara Salmen, founder and CEO of the foundation, and Dulatbek Ikbayev — Managing Partner at McKinsey in Central Asia and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Teach For Qazaqstan.

In this article, we've gathered the key points from the conversation: how the Teach For Qazaqstan program works, what problem it helps to solve, and why more and more companies see education as a long-term contribution to human capital and the country's future.

The problem it all starts with

The place where a child is born largely determines the rest of their life. In Kazakhstan, the gap between urban and rural schools is felt especially sharply, and the teaching profession has lost its prestige over the past 30 years. As Dulatbek Ikbayev noted, there was, for a long time, negative selection into schools.

In the countries where I've lived, regardless of where you were born — in a village or a city — you have roughly equal opportunities, because the state guarantees the same quality of school education. Unfortunately, that's not the case here.

Dulatbek Ikbayev

How the program works

Teach For Qazaqstan selects strong university graduates and specialists from different fields — engineers, economists, IT professionals — and prepares them to work in schools. After retraining, participants move for two years to rural schools and single-industry towns, where they teach full-time.

The retraining is provided by the foundation's partner, SDU University. Under the 2019 law on the status of the teacher, any citizen of the country with higher education can complete it. The foundation sends at least three participants to each school: changing the environment alone is almost impossible.

Why the program works over the long term

The most important thing about the Teach For Qazaqstan program is that its impact doesn't end in the classroom. Each participant works with roughly 130 children, but the effect doesn't stop there.

Over time, many graduates stay in the education system and become school principals and leaders of change. This way, the program gradually helps to change not only individual schools, but the whole system.

We know that our education system can't be changed by revolutionary methods. It's important to create a critical mass of agents of change within it.

Dulatbek Ikbayev

Not grades, but new opportunities

The main goal of the program is not to bring children up to speed in math, but to broaden their view of the world. For a rural schoolchild, the horizon of possibilities is often limited to what they see around them. A young specialist from the city shows by their own example that the world is bigger. Participants talk to children as equals and ask for their opinions; for a child whose opinions are rarely asked for, this becomes a source of support.

The main goal is to expand their boundaries. It's not about subject knowledge, it's about possibilities. About the fact that the world is much wider than they see it.

Dulatbek Ikbayev

The foundation works not only with children in lessons, but changes the whole environment around the school. A teacher can support a child in class, but if a different attitude prevails at home or within the teaching staff, the effect quickly fades. Real change begins when the program participants, the parents, and the school's management team all look in the same direction.

Sending our participants to a school is good, but not always enough. A participant can tell a student: "You'll succeed; you need to try." And at home, the mother will say, "Well, listen, this isn't for you." And motivation drops immediately. That's why we need to work with both parents and the school's management teams.

Gulnara Salmen

Trust and transparency

For a charitable foundation, trust is a working tool. At the meeting, Gulnara Salmen explained how oversight is structured.

• The foundation is part of the global Teach For All network, which spans more than 64 countries and meets its standards, including autonomy and a child protection policy.
• The annual financial audit was carried out by international auditors, including Ernst & Young and Baker Tilly.
• All audits and reports are published on the foundation's website.
• McKinsey consultants help the foundation as intellectual volunteers, on a pro bono basis.

Our reputation is the authority of the organization, the trust of our participants and our sponsors in everything we do

Gulnara Salmen

Results

The foundation launched in September 2022 and has since grown into a functioning system.

• The program operates in 11 schools across four regions, and a fifth is now being launched — the Abai region.
• All 28 graduates of the first cohorts have stayed in the education system.

Former IT professionals who came in as computer science teachers developed tools for educators and made them open to everyone. Graduates from a village in the Karaganda region held a festival for parents at their own expense. A religious studies expert who left the ministry to become a history teacher at a school now leads seminars for educators in the west of the country.

These stories confirm the long-term nature of the program: participants don't leave education after two years in school, but stay and continue to change the system from within.

How to support the foundation

Teach For Qazaqstan is funded through donations, and the project's sustainability depends on the breadth of its supporter base. The state participates systematically: it officially employs participants as teachers and pays their salaries.

The foundation can be supported with a contribution of any size. One of the formats discussed at the meeting is for several entrepreneurs to join forces and launch the program in a particular region.

I always came to the conclusion that education, especially school education, delivers the greatest return on what you invest. If we want to build a responsible, cultured society, the most important thing is to instill the right values in children.

Andrey Berezin

co-founder of Raison

If the foundation's mission resonates with you and you'd like to learn how to support it, get in touch with your personal Raison manager or write directly to Gulnara Salmen. She will answer any questions about the program and how to donate at [email protected].