A CSI manager deciding where an education budget goes this year is going to meet a lot of organisations with good intentions and strong slide decks. I sit on the other side of that table often enough to have formed a view on which questions separate them, so here are five; each one is a question I would want asked of kolab., too.
1. What is your evidence base, and what is the sample size?
A percentage on its own does not tell you much. When kolab. reports that 82.1% of teachers rated the ideas in our spelling module as extremely useful, that figure comes from a feedback form completed in August 2025 by 39 teachers on a project we conducted in KwaZulu-Natal. Thirty-nine is a small sample, and I try to say so every time it comes up. A partner who names the sample is giving you something you can weigh; a partner who only gives you the percentage is asking you to take the weighing on trust.
2. Who checked it?
There is a real difference between an organisation that evaluates itself and one that has been evaluated by somebody else, and the language around this can get loose. kolab. was endorsed through internal moderation by JET Education Services. That is a meaningful endorsement. It is not the same thing as independent certification, so I don’t describe it that way. It might be worth asking any partner, us included, which of the two they have, in those words.
3. Does this reach the teacher, or the class in the building now?
Both are legitimate. A bursary, a workbook and a repaired classroom each land on the children in that school this year, and that is worth funding. Teacher development works on a different timescale, because by our estimate a teacher reaches around 1 155 learners over a 35-year career; it’s a working figure, and it assumes a full career. Knowing which of the two you are buying seems more useful to me than assuming a programme does both.
4. What survives the end of the funding?
If I could only ask one, it would be this one. A workshop that needs a facilitator, a projector and a budget runs for as long as the money does; a practice a teacher can run again on her own, with a script and a page, keeps going afterwards. It is worth asking what the programme leaves behind on the day the contract closes.
5. What do you not publish?
Every organisation has a figure it would rather leave out, and the answer tells you a lot about the partner in front of you. I would rather a founder name the number she avoids and explain why than hand over a set of results with no soft edges. A deck with no weak number in it is a deck someone took the weak numbers out of.
None of these five is difficult for an honest partner to answer, and that is one reason I chose them. If a programme is doing what it says, the answers are already written down somewhere.
