Notes from Saly: Ideas, Nerves, and Everything in Between

I went to Saly telling myself I was going to relax.
This was optimistic.

By the time I arrived at the Daara Year 2, second Learning Retreat, my head was already full. Not in a dramatic way, just in the steady, quiet way that comes from carrying work that didn’t begin that week, or even that month. Work that had been unfolding over time, across teams and countries, with many people involved and outcomes that mattered.

Daara is a learning and innovation platform that brings together organisations working on foundational literacy and numeracy across Africa. It combines structured learning, peer exchange, and a competitive Innovation Fund that supports new and promising ideas. Being part of Daara means learning in public, testing ideas seriously, and sitting with both possibility and pressure at the same time.

I joined eBASE Africa through work linked to the Daara Innovation Fund, at a time when eBASE was part of three different consortium projects. Within that setup, I led the evaluation for one consortium, while my colleagues, Che Myra and Ambang Tatiane, led the evaluations for the other two. Each of us was deeply embedded in a specific project, but we were constantly in conversation across projects, sharing insights, coordinating approaches, and supporting one another. For me, it often felt like working both from within a project and across the wider Daara ecosystem, sometimes quietly in the background, and sometimes right in the middle of things.

Before Saly, There Was the Work

From October 2025, when the Innovation Fund was launched, my colleagues and I were working closely with partner organisations to prepare proposals. These projects cut across different ideas and contexts, but they shared something important: they were ambitious, thoughtful, and grounded in real challenges around foundational learning.

This meant weeks of conversations, brainstorming sessions, proposal drafts, feedback rounds, revisions, and re-revisions. We moved between consortiums, helping teams sharpen ideas, think through feasibility, clarify learning questions, and strengthen the logic of our proposals.

We were trusted to lead much of this process. That trust came with freedom, but also weight. Some days were energising. Other days were long. And some days ended with the kind of tiredness that comes from caring deeply while racing against deadlines. By the time January arrived, I already knew the Innovation Fund would be an emotional undercurrent of the Saly retreat, even if it wasn’t always spoken about directly.

Arriving in Saly: Learning in the Gaps

The retreat itself lasted three days. What stayed with me went well beyond the agenda.

One of the central threads of the retreat was working with government, not as an afterthought, but as a core strategy for scale, sustainability, and real impact. Again and again, conversations returned to what it means to engage governments as allies in education reform, partners in innovation, and custodians of long-term change.

Being in Senegal made this especially tangible.

We learned directly from Senegalese partner organisations like ARED and LARTES, whose work is deeply embedded in collaboration with government. Listening to their organisational journeys, their growth, and the compromises and patience required to work at system level was grounding and, honestly, inspiring. ARED’s team lead, Mamadou Ly, spoke about leadership, persistence, and scale with a calm confidence that comes from experience. It is impossible to miss Mamadou in a room, partly because of his presence, and partly because he is, quite literally, very tall. But beyond the height, it was his clarity and humility that stayed with me. Hearing about ARED’s journey, including recognition like the Yirdan Prize, made the idea of long-term, government-aligned work feel real, not abstract.

Figure 1: Charlotte with fellow Partners

Seeing the Work in Schools

The school visits were another moment where theory met reality.

Walking into classrooms where ARED’s innovations had been implemented in collaboration with government partners brought the conversations about scale and systems to life. These were not pilot projects sitting on the margins, they were programmes embedded within public education spaces, shaped with teachers, and owned locally.

For me, this reinforced something important: working with government is slow, complex, and sometimes frustrating, but it is also where change becomes durable.

Figure 2: Visit and observation of the ARED inspired Remediation approach in Numeracy at Ecole NGOR NDAME NDIAYE FATICK

The Session That Made Me Pause

One session, in particular, stayed with me: Looking Back to Leap Forward.

The session invited organisations to reflect openly on the past year, on what had gone well, what had been difficult, and what they were learning as they looked ahead to 2026. What struck me was the tone. This wasn’t polished reflection. It was candid. People spoke about growth, but also about strain. About progress, but also about uncertainty. Listening to these reflections reminded me that even in spaces filled with strong organizations and experienced leaders, no one has it fully figured out. That honesty pushed me inward. I found myself reflecting on my own year, the pace of the work, the responsibility I had taken on earlier than I expected, and how much of my learning had come from simply staying present and open.

Pitch Day, From the Side

Then came the pitching session.

Five consortiums were presenting Innovation Fund ideas. Only three would be selected. eBASE Africa was involved in four of them. I wasn’t presenting, but I was deeply invested. We had worked closely with consortium members in the months leading up to this moment, supporting the thinking behind their ideas and helping shape how those ideas were communicated. Myra and Tatiane couldn’t be physically present at the retreat, so I was updating them in real time, which meant the nerves were shared across distance. I sat through the pitches outwardly calm, inwardly alert. I kept thinking about the months behind each presentation, the work, the care, the belief that had gone into each idea.

When the results were announced later that day, relief came quickly. Gratitude followed. And then a quieter feeling for the ideas that didn’t move forward. Some of them were strong, and acknowledging that felt necessary.

Figure 3: Nancy pitching the Kalimani proposal for the Jenga Hub, Action Foundation and eBASE Consortium.

What I’m Still Sitting With

I left Saly with clarity,

About how we support ideas without becoming attached to outcomes.
About how responsibility can arrive earlier than expected, and how you grow into it.
About how learning spaces can hold confidence and doubt at the same time.

The retreat reminded me that this work is not only technical. It is relational, emotional, and deeply human. And sometimes, being present, listening carefully, and doing your part well is enough.

I’m still thinking about Saly, and I suspect I will be for a while, not only because of the retreat itself, but also because at some point the conversations moved to a space with louder music, dimmer lights, and far fewer learning objectives. It turns out that people who spend their days thinking seriously about education are also surprisingly good dancers.

I’m also deeply grateful to the Daara Secretariat team for holding the retreat with such care and intention, and to partners like Gates Foundation, represented by Izzy Boggild-Jones, whose steady emphasis on learning, reflection, and long-term thinking framed the retreat in ways that felt both challenging and reassuring. From the big picture to the smallest details, their work made it possible for the rest of us to simply show up, engage fully, and focus on the work.

Figure 4: Paulene, Charlotte, Mammuso and Rasheedat on their way to dinner