In today’s PurposePhil Pulse edition, I’m excited to share a wide-ranging conversation with Dayoung Lee, Partner at Dalberg and Global Co-Lead of its Education to Employment practice. Dayoung brings a systems thinker’s mindset and a practitioner’s pragmatism, drawing from a decade of work across education finance, edtech, and systems change, spanning India, Asia, and the global landscape.
We talked about her approach to education transformation, including outcomes-based financing, the opportunities and limitations of AI, and how to embed scalable solutions within public systems. But our conversation also dug deeper, into Dayoung’s leadership journey, the role of incentives in behavior change, and how growing up across four countries shaped her lifelong commitment to education.
I’d love to start by getting a better sense of what you do at Dalberg. What’s your role, what are your main projects, and what’s keeping you busy these days?
At Dalberg, I co-lead our global Education to Employment practice, what we call E2E. It’s one of our largest practice areas, alongside Health & Nutrition, Climate & Environment, Finance & Investment, and others. Some are sectoral, like E2E, while others are more cross-cutting, like Digital & Data, Gender or Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning.
Most of my work sits within Dalberg’s Education to Employment practice, where I shape and lead strategy and research projects across Asia, particularly in India, as well as globally. Around a third of my portfolio is outside the region. One example you might recall is the project we worked on together during your time at the Jacobs Foundation—a global mapping of networks and repositories in education, identifying best practices, challenges, and gaps in how they generate, codify, and disseminate knowledge.
Beyond projects, a key part of my role is nurturing the practice itself, ensuring that we’re not just executing projects but synthesizing what we’re learning, sharing insights across teams, and helping shape the broader discourse in education. That includes thought leadership, internal knowledge management, and making sure Dalberg shows up in the right platforms and ecosystems to stay ahead of sector trends. I see it as cultivating a community of practice, so we’re not operating in silos, but really drawing from each other’s work to improve how we serve clients and partners.
And what are some of the projects or themes you’re most engaged with right now?
One major area I’ve been doubling down on over the past few years is outcomes-based finance and innovative financing more broadly. It feels especially timely, given how traditional bilateral aid is declining or being disrupted. There’s a growing need to attract private capital, but also to make limited funds stretch further.
Outcomes-based financing is compelling because it shifts the focus from activities and inputs, like how many teacher trainings happened, to whether we’re actually seeing improvements in student learning or systemic delivery. We’re trying to move from funding effort to funding results.
Some of our work in this area includes designing and managing the LiftEd initiative, where we aim not only for cost effectiveness but also scalability and sustainability, measuring and incentivizing deeper systemic shifts beyond the learning outcomes observed each year. We’ve also recently supported the Global Partnership for Education on their innovative finance strategy as they head into a replenishment cycle. So, we’re thinking both at the level of specific financing instruments and at the broader ecosystem level: how can actors move beyond traditional grants and make smarter use of capital?
Thank you for that overview. I’m sure we’ll return to the financing angle later when we dive into systems change. But before that, could you also speak to your work on AI?
Yes. AI is the other big thread. There’s a huge promise there, but in reality, we haven’t seen many examples that work well at scale yet. There are exciting pilots, sure, but often just a few hundred schools. And the sector hasn’t moved fast enough.
With the current pace of AI disruption, I think we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer optional. Systems are going to have to rethink how students are taught, and what skills are needed to thrive in an increasingly digital world. Education is still largely stuck in the 1950s, especially in the global South, kids facing a blackboard, learning language and math in similar ways as decades ago. There have been incremental improvements and pockets of innovations, but not fundamental change.
We’re working on several AI-related initiatives, including having just recently launched a Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) collaborative called PAL Works in India. PAL has been shown through RCTs to be one of the most effective edtech models, even before AI advancements, but uptake has been very linear and fragmented. With support from philanthropies and edtech players, we’ve brought together 20 of India’s leading PAL players, both NGOs and private actors, along with research agencies and technical intermediaries. AI is supercharging these solutions, shortening product development cycles and enhancing effectiveness. The goal is to help states adopt PAL in a coordinated way, with support on implementation design, evaluation, and developing public goods like Procurement Guidelines and Standard Operations Procedures.
Another project involves partnering with a major tech company and a global development agency to form a social action partnership. The aim is to leverage cutting-edge AI tools to address some of the education sector’s most pressing challenges. But the question is always: can this go beyond CSR and become something embedded and sustained?
Thank you for sharing that. So, we’ve covered your role and your thematic focus areas. I’d love to hear more now about your personal journey: how did you enter the education space, and how has your perspective evolved over time?
I’m originally from South Korea, now Korean American. My dad worked for Hyundai in exports, so I moved around a lot, attending seven schools across four countries. That gave me firsthand experience of very different education systems, from a Christian private school in Korea, to a South Florida public school with metal detectors and police on patrol, to an elite international school in Spain.
That mobility, combined with my roots in Korea, shaped how I view education. My grandmother only completed second grade, at that time, girls weren’t expected or encouraged to study.
She used to say she’d tiptoe outside school walls, just to watch her peers learn. Though fiercely intelligent, she never had the chance to pursue a formal education. She often reminded me how different her life might have been if she’d had that opportunity. Her story has been a quiet but persistent force behind my work: a reminder that talent is universal, but opportunity is not.
I’ve pursued this path so that others who’ve been overlooked or held back, like she was, might have a fairer shot at building the lives they dream of.
Korea’s transformation into one of the most educated countries in the world, especially in terms of female education, happened within two generations. I’ve always seen education as the core lever for development, not just at the individual level but for entire nations.
Professionally, I started at The Parthenon Group because of their education practice. When I joined Dalberg in 2012, there wasn’t a real education practice yet. I saw an opportunity to build one, aligned with Dalberg’s broader social impact mission. Over time, we’ve grown it into a distinct global practice.
That background, of both personal mobility and national transformation, is powerful. And your grandmother’s story reminds me of mine, who has still started to learn to use the computer and surf on the internet at the age of 85.
And it brings us naturally to the big question: systems change. What does it take to move from pockets of innovation to lasting system transformation? What do you see as the main barriers?
Of course, there are many layers, from classroom management to school leadership to system-level delivery and accountability. But if I had to distill it: we’re still far too focused on inputs and compliance, and not enough on outcomes.
We recently spoke with a senior Ministry of Education official in India who explained how one of the country’s largest centrally funded schemes, worth billions, is still completely input-driven when it comes to accountability and monitoring.
It’s all about how many teachers were recruited, how many uniforms distributed, not whether children are learning. Teacher performance isn’t tracked meaningfully. They’re overburdened with administrative duties, and there’s no real measurement of classroom effectiveness or feedback loops to improve.
This is in stark contrast to how most professionals operate. We all work within performance-based systems, quarterly reviews, clear KPIs, feedback mechanisms. But in education, especially in global south contexts, that doesn’t exist. We're expecting magic without setting up the basic conditions for success.
Thank you for sharing this example. And as a follow-up: how do you think about the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? What kinds of incentives work in education systems, and what are the risks?
It’s such an important question. Anything related to compensation or human resource reform is politically sensitive. Some efforts, like linking teacher pay to student outcomes, have been attempted in places like the U.S., but with mixed results and often strong union resistance.
That said, we’ve seen even modest financial incentives can shift behavior. Professor Karthik Muralidharan has conducted a study in Andhra Pradesh where a bonus of less than ₹500/month (equivalent to just 3% of salaries) linked to student learning outcomes improved teaching performance significantly, without any additional training.
In the absence of that, softer incentives, like recognition, professional development, or exposure visits, can also be powerful. Many teachers have never been offered those opportunities, even when state budgets technically allow for them.
The challenge is data. In many systems, the data is unreliable or gamed. So, you need high-quality, low-cost, credible ways to measure outcomes.
We’re testing exactly that in an upcoming initiative in Jharkhand, in collaboration with the state education council. With support from the Maitri Trust and Porticus, we’ll be piloting a recognition-based innovation challenge for district and mid-level government officials working on foundational learning and healthy school climate that promotes socioemotional wellbeing. We want to see what types of rewards are most meaningful and feasible, without relying on financial bonuses or expensive external measurements.
Let’s talk about scaling impact. How do you think about balancing depth versus breadth? What makes an intervention truly scalable?
This is a huge issue, especially in EdTech. Too often, I see no correlation between effectiveness and scale. Highly effective interventions remain small, while others scale for political or logistical reasons, even if they show little learning impact.
One example from my career is the Quality Education India Development Impact Bond (DIB). It showed 200–300% improvement in student learning relative to comparison groups, across 200,000 children, across 4 years that included COVID. Yet those interventions didn’t fully embed into the public system. They were implemented with high fidelity and strong results, but without a pathway to institutionalization.
The key lesson? Scale can’t be an afterthought. From the outset, you need to design for it. That means working through government systems, aligning with job descriptions, upskilling public actors, and ensuring affordability. If something only works with an external team or at a high cost per child, it’s unlikely to sustain.
That inspired our design for the LiftEd DIB Impact Bond, which aims to build government’s capacity to drive outcomes.
In the case of PAL, many implementations have actually disrupted classroom schedules. They’re seen as burdensome because they take time away from syllabus coverage and don’t align with exam incentives. Even if students make gains, those gains aren’t visible in the assessments that matter to teachers.
So now we’re focusing more on designing for adoption: rethinking workflows, aligning with what teachers care about, and building demand within the system. If the people delivering change don’t see value, it won’t scale, no matter how effective it is on paper.
Thank you, that was such a clear articulation of the design-for-scale challenge.
To close, I’d love to ask about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style, both in working with partners and internally with your team? And has being a woman shaped that journey?
It definitely has. I started in consulting, where standards are high and performance is the currency. When I briefly ran a mentoring NGO in India, my co-founder, who’s also a good friend, told me I was “squeezing people like lemons.” I had set the bar so high that no one could do their best work.
That was a wake-up call. I learned to meet people where they are, and to recognize growth relative to their starting point, not just relative to my expectations. Praise and recognition matter, just like they do for students. It’s something I now consciously practice with my team and try to reflect in my work in the education space.
Culturally, growing up in a gendered and hierarchical system like South Korea, and as a younger woman leader, I also used to avoid tension. I was indirect, hesitant to speak up, especially in settings like business school where class participation counted heavily, and I’d overthink my point until the moment passed.
Over time, I’ve learned that surfacing tension, early and productively, is critical. Whether it’s working with a tech company that also has commercial interests, or a development agency focused on equity, you have to name the differences and design around them. Otherwise, you hit roadblocks later.
Being able to hold that space, where differences are acknowledged and used constructively, is something I now see as core to my leadership.
Thank you so much for sharing that. To close, is there any final reflection or vision you’d like to leave us with?
I think we’re still searching too hard for silver bullets, whether it's a new AI tool or a billion-dollar financing mechanism.
But most of the challenges in education aren’t technological or financial. They’re deeply human, behavioral, relational, and contextual.
Even if the tech exists, even if the funding is there, it won’t land unless we design for how people actually behave, what they’re incentivized to do, and how systems are structured. We need to be more comfortable with complexity. Sometimes the answer isn’t one big thing, it’s a lot of small, well-aligned things.
And that’s okay. Embracing that complexity, while staying grounded in outcomes that matter, is the path to real systems change.