Developing Collective Impact to Improve Foundational Learning: Evidence from Madagascar

To address the severe learning crisis in Africa, the improvement of foundational learning is a priority policy issue. In Madagascar, the Ministry of Education began scaling up the training on the pedagogical approach, called Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), in primary education. This training was part of a package of interventions that aimed at strengthening the capacity of the school management committee (SMC) to develop collaboration between the school and the local community and organize remedial activities. As these interventions were scaled up progressively to increase their coverage of the regions, this study investigates their impact by the difference-in-differences strategy, targeting those schools in communes near the border of neighboring regions. In Year 1 of the research, the interventions helped the students who could not have read letters reach the level of reading words written in the local language. In Year 2, the interventions improved the learning outcome in numeracy by 0.39 standard deviations. Compared to the pilot phase, the scaled-up interventions improved the cost-effectiveness by at least 1.4 times in literacy and 1.7 times in numeracy. Developing the collaboration of different actors in Madagascar demonstrates a strategy to establish a collective impact to address the learning crisis.