Inside a World Bank-supported project to connect every public school, teacher and family on Edsby
Most countries that set out to modernize K-12 technology end up with a digital patchwork of district decisions, overlapping vendors and data that lives in multiple places. Georgia is taking the smarter path. The Ministry of Education, Science and Youth (MESY) is rolling out a single learning platform for every public school in the country, procured nationally, integrated into the country’s information systems, and delivered as part of a broader reform program rather than as a standalone IT project.
The platform is Edsby, built by a Canadian K-12 software firm whose technology already operates at national scale for New Zealand’s 800,000 learners. Edsby was selected by MESY in October 2024 through a competitive selection process run under World Bank procurement rules and is being delivered in country with Tbilisi-based technology integrator Orient Logic.
Reach already exceeds the original target
By mid-2025, 304,893 students had access to improved learning environments in I2Q-supported schools, against an original closing target of 116,000. The 200-school STEAM extracurricular program that runs alongside the LMS work is now fully implemented. Independent project surveys show 74 percent of parents satisfied with their engagement in school improvement, against an original target of 30 percent.
These numbers describe the schools, teachers and families now coming onto the platform. The Ministry is not introducing Edsby into a vacuum. It is plugging it into an education system that has already been investing in connectivity, equipment and teacher capacity for several years.
“Two national governments on opposite sides of the world have now chosen Edsby for their entire K-12 system, and Georgia’s procurement was the most rigorous we have ever been through.” – John Myers, CEO, Edsby
Built for Georgia, integrated with Georgian systems
Edsby and Orient Logic have localized the platform for the Georgian language, the national curriculum, and the gradebook, attendance and reporting practices that Georgian schools use. The system runs on Microsoft Azure with regional data residency, and Edsby is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, the international standard for information security management.
Equally important is what the LMS connects to. It is designed to interoperate with Georgia’s Education Management Information System and the e-School platform that MESY is upgrading in parallel under the same I2Q component. The intent is a coherent national stack in which student records, school operations and day-to-day teaching and learning flow through systems that talk to each other, rather than parallel silos that each school must reconcile by hand.
From preview to live classrooms
MESY brought sixty hand-picked school leaders from across the country to Tbilisi in mid-2025 for a preview of the platform. Family engagement and teacher capacity-building drew the strongest response. The first wave of Georgian public schools came onto Edsby in live classroom use shortly after, with subsequent waves now being onboarded in stages alongside teacher training, parent onboarding and in-country support coordinated by Orient Logic.
Part of a US$102.7M reform
The contract sits inside Georgia’s Innovation, Inclusion and Quality (I2Q) Project, the country’s flagship general-education reform. I2Q is financed by a US$102.7 million International Bank for Reconstruction and Development loan to Georgia (IBRD-89550), implemented by MESY together with the Municipal Development Fund of Georgia. Component 2, which funds general education and includes the LMS, is the largest line of work in the program at US$91.3 million.
In its July 2025 Implementation Status and Results Report, the World Bank rated progress toward the project’s development objectives as Satisfactory. As of that report, 64.94 percent of the loan had been disbursed, and the project’s closing date had been extended by one year to March 2027 following a restructuring approved by the Bank in late 2024 and ratified by the Parliament of Georgia in February 2025. The development objectives themselves did not change. The extension simply gives schools and the Ministry the runway to absorb the LMS, the parallel e-School system upgrade, new Grade 10 national assessments and ongoing school rehabilitation work without compressing the timeline.
What this means for Georgia
A national LMS is not, by itself, an outcome. It is a piece of public infrastructure. Its value to a country depends on what gets built with it: better teaching, better feedback to families, better data for principals and policymakers, better continuity for students who move between schools or regions. Georgia is putting that infrastructure in place once, for the whole country, under a procurement framework that withstands scrutiny.
When I2Q closes in March 2027, the goal is for Edsby to be the everyday digital environment of Georgian K-12 education: connected to the country’s information systems, aligned to its curriculum and assessment policies, and operating at national scale like Edsby’s New Zealand deployment that has run on the same platform for years.
In Georgia, the infrastructure is in. Schools are coming online. The work of using it well is now underway.
