Who we are
Founded in 2010 by Prof. Paul Beamish, the 39 Country Initiative is housed at the Ivey Business School. The initiative supports universities in the world’s poorest 46 countries, as defined by a per capita income of less than $2,000 USD annually. It leverages Ivey Publishing’s vast collection of cases and teaching material and has a global network of schools supporting its key activities.
Our vision
To increase economic activity in the 46 lowest income countries by improving the business manager’s capacity for: decision making, critical thinking and problem solving.
Our mission
To provide current, relevant teaching materials and pedagogical skills development to higher educators with a view to improving management education in the world's 46 lowest income countries.
The 39 Country Initiative is consistent with UN Social Development Goal #1: Poverty Reduction. The logic is simple. More and higher-quality education leads to greater opportunities to move out of poverty. The 39 Country Initiative is also consistent with SDG 4 (Quality Education) and the promotion of SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).
Where we work
What we do
The 39 Country Initiative identifies key activities that support its mission:
- Provide free access to Ivey Publishing teaching content for faculty in the 46 countries
- The Ivey collection includes decision-oriented cases, exercises, technical notes (similar to book chapters), digital learning materials, case supplements, support files (such as spreadsheets), and Ivey Business Journal practitioner articles. As of Sept 19, 2024, these constitute 8773 items, and total well over 50,000 pages of educational material. The cost to create such a body of proprietary content exceeds C$60 million.
- Faculty members and their students in the world’s poorest countries will have access to the exact same body of content as their university level counterparts elsewhere. And importantly, they will have access to new content (more than 400 new cases, etc… annually) at exactly the same time as everyone else in the world.
- Provide pedagogical skill development through case teaching workshops in the 46 countries
- Collect printed books, journals, and business case studies for container shipment to higher education institutions in the 46 countries
- Arrange for the translation of Ivey cases into the French language
Our impact
Some of our key successes to-date include:
- Registering 2,000 professors in the 46 countries for access to cases
- Shipping approximately 70,000 books, journals and cases to schools in the 46 countries reaching over 100,000 students
- Organizing a global network of 22 collection nodes at universities around the world
What our beneficiaries are saying about our work
Our strategy
Management education in Africa, particularly in the poorest countries, suffers from the greatest resource constraints of any continent on earth. Three major challenges exist:
- Lack of current teaching material
- Very expensive books/photocopies so insufficient quantity of materials available
- Too few qualified faculty
The 39 Country Initiative has established a three-pronged strategy which aims to improve management education in the world’s poorest countries by addressing each of these major challenges. View Paul W. Beamish's presentation from August 2022 to learn more about the strategy behind the 39 Country Initiative.
The 39 Country Initiative is a collaboration with Ivey Publishing. For more information about access to Ivey cases and why cases are an important teaching tool, visit our Access to Cases page. To find out more about Ivey cases, visit the Ivey Publishing home page.
One of the key activities of the 39 Country Initiative is the collection and shipment of large quantities of printed books, journals, and business case studies to higher education institutions in the now 46 countries. To assist with the large scale collection of materials, the 39 Country Initiative has organized a global network of business schools. These collection nodes work together to collect, organize and ship materials to one of 46 countries. To find out more about setting up a book collection node, view Starting a Collection Node. To learn more about our shipments to date, visit out web page: Book Shipments Overview