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 47 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.
The 39 Country Initiative is consistent with UN Social Development Goals #1: Poverty Reduction and #4 : Quality Education. The logic is simple. More and higher-quality education leads to greater opportunities to move out of poverty using current, world-class decision-oriented teaching material.
Our Vision
To increase economic activity in the 47 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 47 lowest income countries.
Where We Focus
What We Do
The 39 Country Initiative identifies key activities that support its mission:
- Provide free access to Ivey Publishing teaching content for university faculty in the 47 countries to use with their students
- 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 February 20, 2026, these constitute 9586 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 face-to-face case teaching workshops in the 47 countries
- Collect printed books, journals, course packs and business case studies for selective container shipment to higher education institutions in the 47 countries
- Help to select Ivey cases for translation in French. (About one third of the poorest countries are Francophone).
Our Strategy
Management education in the poorest countries, suffers from the greatest resource constraints of any universities 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 April 2025 to learn more about the strategy behind the 39 Country Initiative.
Read Paul W. Beamish's article published October 16, 2025 in AIB Insights
Our Impact
Some of our key successes to-date include:
- Registering over 3,020 professors in the 47 countries for access to cases, reaching over 100,000 students
- Organizing free case teaching workshops to faculty at 40+ universities in 15 countries
- Shipping approximately 70,000 books, journals and cases to schools in the 47 countries
- Organizing a global network of 23 collection nodes at universities around the world
What our beneficiaries are saying about our work
The impact of the 39 Country Initiative is best expressed by the educators it supports. Hear directly from faculty around the world how the 39 Country Initiative's activities have transformed their classrooms, empowered their students, and elevated the quality of business education in their institutions. Hear from the business schools who have received the 10-ton container shipments of books, journals and course packs, and from the professors who now have access to the Ivey Publishing Case Collection, and from the faculty members in universities in Nepal, Lesotho, Cambodia, Zambia, Benin, and Senegal who attended the the face-to-face case-teaching workshops.