How does it feel to be a family sending your child to a school system that ranks 65th out of 65 countries in a global survey? Like the odds are stacked against you.

After decades of political turmoil, Peru’s youth can look forward to growing up in a nation at peace, with one of the best performing economies in Latin America. But a thriving middle class depends on a well-trained workforce, and if the upward trend is to continue, Peru’s educational system will have to improve.

Few know this better than Peruvian innovator Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, the head of InterGroup, who asked our design firm to help address the problem by building a new school system—one that would offer students a quality education and prepare them for the future for about $100 a month.

After months of fieldwork, prototyping and collaboration with the Peruvian team, we designed K–12 curricula, teaching strategies, buildings, operational plans and an underlying financial model for a network of schools.

Today, Innova is one of Latin America’s most ambitious privately funded educational projects and is on track to become the region’s largest private school network by 2018. More importantly, Peruvian kids and their families have a school of which they can be proud.

Read the full case study with juror comments here: [http://www.aiga.org/case-study-innova-schools/]

“This project is an excellent example of design applied to a topic from start to finish. From the business model to the curriculum and physical setting and branding, design thinking was carefully applied. At a time when education could use more creativity, this project does a great job of scaling this thinking to multiple schools, having impact on many children.” —Kate Aronowitz