Niger and Madagascar

Background

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has supported the “School for All” programme in several African countries since 2004.

The “School for All” program, supported by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), has been working to realize educational development through community-wide collaboration in several African countries since 2004. This program has contributed to the development and scale-up of various intervention models including the one for improving school management through information-driven, community-wide collaboration (the Foundational Model) and the one for improving learning outcomes through community-led remedial activities (the Minimum Package for Quality Learning: PMAQ). The original PMAQ model has provided quality learning opportunities for over 800,000 primary school children in some of the partner countries over the past decade. To further accelerate children’s learning, JICA has been integrating the TaRL approach into the original PMAQ model for both literacy and numeracy.

Partnership

JICA has teamed up with education Ministries in Niger and Madagascar to empower SMCs and communities to improve children’s learning.

JICA supports the Ministries of education in Niger and Madagascar to scale up the TaRL-integrated learning improvement model. The “School for All” program provides training for representatives of School Management Committees (SMCs), government teachers, and community volunteers to plan and implement in-class (in Niger) and out-of-class remedial activities (in both Niger & Madagascar) to help children strengthen their foundational numeracy and literacy skills. Through a series of experience sharing visits and workshops, JICA has worked with Pratham and J-PAL to incorporate lessons from TaRL to strengthen the program. In June 2018, J-PAL, Pratham, and JICA signed a tripartite memorandum of cooperation (MOC) to provide sustainable and scalable solutions to overcome the learning crisis.

Children in Niger work with play money during a numeracy PMAQ class.

Photo: JICA

The PMAQ Model

Figure 1: PDCA cycle of the TaRL-integrated PMAQ model

The “School for All” program started piloting TaRL-integrated PMAQ models in Niger and Madagascar in 2017/2018. The original PMAQ, before TaRL integration, relied more on learning materials designed for “self-learning at the right level”. By contrast, the latest TaRL-integrated PMAQ model has been strengthened with ASER tools and activity-based facilitation, while successfully reducing the per-child intervention cost to 2.42 USD for Niger and 0.30 USD for Madagascar, respectively. The PMAQ activities of these two countries have been demonstrating encouraging improvements in pupils’ learning. As a result, the Nigerien Ministry of Education has officially adopted the PMAQ-TaRL approach to be used for in-class remedial activities since 2021/2022.

Table 1: Summary of the TaRL-integrated PMAQ model in Niger & Madagascar

The TaRL-integrated PMAQ is believed to have contributed to the learning progress of children in Niger and Madagascar as follows:

Figure 2-2: Learning progress in Reading of 850,000 primary children, Maradi & Zinder Regions, NIGER (in 2021/2022)

Madagascar

(Note: For the Malagasy model, the results of a randomized controlled trial are being compiled and expected to be published shortly.)

Figure 3-2: Learning progress in Reading of 170,000 primary children, Analamanga Region, Madagascar (in 2019/2020)