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 Niger and Madagascar 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 has worked closely with the Ministries of education in Niger and Madagascar to scale up the TaRL-integrated learning improvement model.

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.

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.

Latest Reach and Results

JICA recently investigated the impact of a package of interventions that strengthens the capacity of school management committee in utilizing information on student assessments to sensitize and mobilize parents, teachers, and community members for joint actions. The findings revealed that that the package significantly increased the percentage of schools that organized the supplementary classes of remedial activities, mobilizing voluntary contributions from the local stakeholders. It also remarkably improved basic reading and math learning in all the targeted grades. The package also increased the percentage of the grade 3 students who could read a paragraph written in the local language by 25 percentage points. Furthermore, the package decreased student dropouts and increased the transition rate to lower secondary education thus demonstrating the power of community-wide support in improving learning even in the context of a low-income country.

More information on the report can be found here.

For the school year 2021/2022, the program is expected to reach a total of over 1.6 million

• 850,000 pupils of 7,000 primary schools (2 regions), in Niger and 860,000 pupils of 7,800 primary schools (8 regions) in Madagascar.

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

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

Figure 2-1: Learning progress in Mathematics of 850,000 primary children, Maradi & Zinder Regions, NIGER (in 2021/2022)

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

MADAGASCAR:

Figure 3-1:  Learning progress in Mathematics of 170,000 primary children, Analamanga Region, Madagascar (in 2018/2019)

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

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

Photo: JICA