Zambia

Background

Zambia was ranked last in the 2011 Southern and East Africa Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ), and falls well below the SACMEQ average in both numeracy and literacy.¹ A 2014 national assessment found that 65% of Zambian Grade 2 learners were unable to read a single word in their local language.²

Faced with these low levels of learning, the Ministry built an intervention based on an idea proven to be effective by several randomised evaluations. Instead of copying an approach from abroad, the Ministry worked to understand the reasons why an approach worked elsewhere, then mapped these reasons to its own context and made decisions about how to scale based on its unique opportunities and constraints. The partners and the Ministry built in systems of monitoring, data analysis and continual review meetings to ensure the programme improved over time.

Catch Up History 

In 2015 Zambia was facing a learning crisis. It had been ranked last in measures of literacy and numeracy by the 2011 Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ), and a 2014 national assessment found that 65% of Zambian Grade 2 learners were unable to read a single word in their local language. There was no shortage of education development aid in Zambia, but the various initiatives were not necessarily aligned and were not addressing the problem of low basic learning levels at scale. In response, the Zambian Ministry of General Education (MoGE – now called Ministry of Education – MoE) decided to revise the primary school curriculum. This process, however, faced several challenges. The MoGE was looking for ways to address the foundational skills gap. 

MoGE’s office of standards and curriculum was particularly keen to adapt the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach, championing the idea within the Ministry and also with a number of development agencies. J-PAL Africa supported this process by targeting key development actors, such as UNICEF, DFID and USAID, sharing evidence on TaRL and discussing how it could be helpfully applied in the Zambian context. Critically, the J-PAL Africa team, part of which would go on to form the TaRL Africa team with Pratham,  believed that the entire process needed to be owned and managed by the key system actor, in this case MoGE, with J-PAL and Pratham providing insights and technical assistance, not driving the decision-making. With MoGE firmly in charge, an important first move was for the Ministry to organize a working group of main education partners, including UNICEF, DfID, now the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), the British Council, and Innovations for Poverty Action Zambia. This group, under MoGE leadership, hatched the plans for a pilot of what the Ministry branded the Catch Up program. The funds for the 80-school pilot were also sourced by the Ministry from the Global Partnership for Education with additional support from UNICEF and J-PAL’s Government Partnership Initiative (GPI). The Ministry also  partnered with VVOB – education for development for additional implementation support during the pilot. 

The pilot was implemented in 80 schools in 2016-2017 and proved significant in a number of ways. First, it confirmed that the majority of Grade 3 to 5 learners in Zambia were lacking basic reading and mathematics skills, with more than half of children in Grades 3 to 5 in Catch Up pilot schools at baseline unable to read words. The process evaluation results found that the program was well implemented, which is essential in establishing its feasibility. Government monitoring largely occurred as planned, teachers stuck to the key principles of TaRL, and they continued to implement the program over time. Critically, learning outcomes improved markedly during the one-year pilot period. According to the government data, the share of children who could not even read a letter fell by 25 percentage points from 33% to 8% during the pilot period, and the share of children reading with basic proficiency (a simple paragraph or a story) grew by 18 percentage points from 34% to 52%. In arithmetic, the share of students in the beginner group (who could not even complete two-digit addition sums) fell by 16 percentage points from 44% to 28% and the share of students with basic proficiency (able to complete two-digit subtraction) rose by 18 percentage points from 32% to 50%.

The Ministry decided to expand the program after the pilot, based not only on positive results but also ease of implementation, since the pilot had been executed with and through the government’s own systems. Other development partners were also enthused by the outcomes of the carefully implemented learning-centered pilot and the Catch Up Program was awarded a grant by USAID Zambia to expand the program to reach 1800 schools (two provinces) over three years (2018-2020). 

In 2020, the Ministry of General Education issued a letter on its plan to roll out Catch Up to the remaining eight Provinces.  Following this, funding was secured for 8 of the 10 provinces from the LEGO Foundation, UNICEF, the Hempel Foundation, Co Impact, and the Belgian government (DGD).  Emergency funding by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) during 2020 and 2021, which supported a COVID emergency response program to address the learning loss from COVID school closures, also supported expansion. 

Pilot Results

The pilot confirmed that the majority of Grade 3 to 5 learners in Zambia are lacking basic reading and mathematics skills, with more than half of children in Grades 3 to 5 in Catch Up pilot schools at baseline unable to read words.

The process monitoring results found that the programme was well implemented. Monitoring largely occurred as planned, and teachers stuck to the key principles of TaRL. Furthermore, they continued to implement the programme over time.

Zambia’s baseline scores were roughly comparable to the baseline in Haryana, India, where a TaRL intervention was proven to be effective in a randomised evaluation.

Learning outcomes improved significantly during the pilot period. According to the government data, the share of children who could not even read a letter fell by 26 percentage points from 33% to 8% during the pilot period, and the share of children reading with basic proficiency (a simple paragraph or a story) grew by 18 percentage points from 34% to 52%. In arithmetic, the share of students in the beginner group (who could not even complete two- digit addition sums) fell by 16 percentage points from 44% to 28% and the share of students with basic proficiency (able to complete two digits subtraction) rose by 18 percentage points from 32% to 50%.

Baseline and endline learning outcomes

Scaling Plans

The Ministry of General Education is eager to scale the programme to more children in Zambia. The Ministry rolled out the Catch Up programme to approximately 1,800 schools in 2019.

Although the pilot has concluded, the team looks at this next phase of scale as another opportunity to learn and improve. Already, the team made a number of improvements since the pilot, including:

• Development of master trainers (selected from province, districts and zones) who were involved in the pilot to lead the scale up.
• A more intensive training for new master trainers and the creation of training programmes, videos and step-by-step guides for facilitators on how to train mentors and teachers. Pratham staff came back to Zambia to support the 10-day training of government master trainers and continues to support these officials with occasional visits.
• Improvements made to the teacher guides, lesson procedures, and activities in the programme following analysis of pilot learning outcome data and focus group discussions with Ministry and VVOB staff from the provincial level, district level and school level.
• VVOB support in the scale-up is provided to the zone, district, and provincial leaders of the programme rather than directly to the teachers. This system helps promote government ownership of the programme.
• Further strengthening the monitoring and feedback system, with more data collection and analysis conducted at the school level by senior teachers. This encourages data-based decision-making to take place at school, and makes aggregation and analysis easier at the zone and district level.