Learning
Rural Learning
Community-governed schools, a paid teaching fellowship, and learning materials in the languages children actually think in.
61,400 children enrolled at partner schools
Fieldstone Collective
Loading this page…
Working in six regions since 2009
Built with communities, not for them.
Fieldstone Collective works alongside rural communities to expand what is possible where they already live — through local education, sustainable livelihoods, and the essential infrastructure that makes both durable.
Programmes
Three things, done for a decade
Fieldstone would rather do three things properly for ten years than nine things for a funding cycle. Each programme is deliberately narrow, and each publishes what it will not do.
Livelihoods
Sustainable Livelihoods
Savings groups, cooperative processing, and market access built on the financial institutions rural households have already invented.
318 savings groups in partnership
Infrastructure
Community Infrastructure
Water systems, footbridges, and small solar grids, designed around the maintenance a community has committed to before construction starts.
47 systems handed to local committees
How we work
We are not an emergency organisation. We arrive slowly, we stay for a decade or more, and we leave behind institutions the community already owned.
The community decides
Every Fieldstone programme begins with a community assembly that sets its own priorities, and none begins without one. We have declined work in eleven districts because the priorities named there were not ones we could serve honestly.
Ten years, not three
Our partnership agreements run for a minimum of ten years. Grant cycles are shorter than the problems they fund, and a school built on a three-year budget becomes a three-year school.
Local institutions, not local branches
We register nothing in our own name. Schools, water committees, and cooperatives are held by the communities that run them, from the first day rather than at handover.
Publish what we get wrong
Every annual review names the programmes that underperformed and what we changed as a result. An accountability report that only contains good news is a marketing document.
2025 in figures
What we can honestly claim
Every figure Fieldstone publishes carries the question it answers and the population it was calculated over. The ones that fall short are printed in the same place as the ones that do not.
- children enrolled at partner schools
- 61,400children enrolled at partner schools
- households in member cooperatives
- 24,700households in member cooperatives
- people with year-round water access
- 84,000people with year-round water access
- of handed-over systems still functioning
- 91%of handed-over systems still functioning
Field Notes
The places we work, one at a time
Six regions across four continents, each with its own partner institution, its own history with us, and its own record of what has and has not held.
- Nyakura HighlandsKenya
- Chansolo BasinZambia
- Sanjala ValleyNepal
- Vega Alta RidgeGuatemala
- Sumarai DeltaIndonesia
- Tazgart PlainMorocco
Stories
Reporting from the partnerships
Rural Learning
The classroom that the rains kept closing
For six years, attendance at Kirambo school collapsed every second term. The explanation was eleven weeks of river, and nobody had thought to write it down.
Nadia Belhaj9 min read
Sustainable Livelihoods
What a savings group knows about risk
Wanjiru Mbatia — Chansolo Basin, Zambia
Community Infrastructure
Eleven metres of footbridge, and a school year
Nadia Belhaj — Sanjala Valley, Nepal
Rural Learning
Teaching in the language the children think in
Tomás Renard — Vega Alta Ridge, Guatemala
Take part
Ten-year promises need ten-year support
Regular giving is the only kind of income a decade-long partnership can be planned around. There are other ways in, and all of them are honest about what they ask.
Support our work
Regular giving is what makes a ten-year commitment to a community possible, and it is the only kind of income we can plan a decade around.
Read about givingVolunteer
Four roles, all of them remote and skilled. We do not place volunteers in partner communities, and we explain why.
See open rolesPartner with us
For community institutions considering a ten-year agreement, and for funders willing to be told what did not work.
How partnership works