Improving the Quality of Education in Rural Zambia by Implementing and Evaluating Different School Interventions
Despite significant gains in educational attainment worldwide, schooling indicators still need substantial improvement. For example, outcomes in Zambia lag in many low- and middle-income countries. Primary school gross enrollment ratio in 2019 was 99%, yet completion rates averaged 69% and the secondary school enrollment ratio was just 20%.
Students who reach secondary school perform poorly: only 10% and 2% of 15-year-old students in seventh grade, or above, respectively, have basic proficiency in reading and mathematics, respectively.
AIR researchers and its partners, Impact Network, Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS), and Palm Associates will address long-standing educational inequities in some of Zambia’s most vulnerable settings. In educational attendance and enrollment, the Eastern Province—the region targeted under this project—ranks the lowest among all provinces in the country.
Since 2017, AIR has funded the organization Impact Network to improve the quality of primary education in 30 community school and five government schools in Zambia’s Eastern Province, using the eSchool 360 project.
AIR researchers conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the program and showed that the investment had substantial and statistically significant effects on test scores and primary school enrolment 14 months and four years, respectively, after program initiation.
AIR's Continuing Investment in the eSchool 360 Program
The current project will continue AIR’s investments in the eSchool 360 program and in complementary interventions, as well as generate rigorous evidence on the impacts and costs of these investments as follows:
- AIR will enable Impact Network to expand the eSchool 360 program, including to schools that were part of the control group in the earlier RCT.
- Concurrently, researchers will investigate how to effectively scale up the program as part of the national educational system.
- Impact Network will pilot a new early grade literacy intervention based on the use of phonetic charts (the “Read Smart” program) in government schools and AIR will conduct an RCT to study the impacts of this program.
- The project will enhance outcomes across grades, not just in primary schools, by funding PEAS programming to improve secondary school quality through enhanced management practices in the same rural areas where Impact Network operates. AIR researchers will investigate the effects of the PEAS program using a quasi-experimental study.
AIR will generate valuable evidence on how innovative educational interventions perform after they are scaled up and incorporated into national educational systems.
The evidence can contribute to decisions about the scale-up of the program, especially because Impact Network and the Zambian Ministry of Education work closely together and contribute to resolving the learning crisis in Zambia by improving learning outcomes and related research.
