What is the learning crisis in sub-Saharan Africa? And what to do about it.

• In Event: Highlighted session: Education for sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa

Proposal

This paper documents the crisis of learning in sub-Saharan Africa and presents the results of our original multi-level analyses of regional and international learning assessments, focusing on the characteristics of students and schools that are correlated with higher levels of learning. In the first section of the paper, we document the crisis by (a) reviewing evidence from seven learning assessments covering three subjects (reading, mathematics and science) across several age and grade groups and (b) showing the share of students reaching minimum levels of performance on these assessments. Looking at the evidence for 29 countries and nearly 100 data points, we find that in one fourth of these, less than 25% of students reach minimum performance levels. In only 15% of the cases analyzed did 75% or more of students reach the minimum threshold. We also show how average performance levels vary across the four country groups as described in the previous paper. In the second section of the paper, we report our original multi-level analyses of large-scale assessments of reading, mathematics and science in grades 2, 6 and 8 in 14 sub-Saharan African countries and address the following questions: (a) what school and student-level characteristics are associated with higher reading, mathematics or science within each country? And (b) what school or student-level characteristics are consistently associated with higher learning across countries? We find that students who are taught in a language different from their home language, attend schools in rural areas, and with large shares of disadvantaged students perform significantly below the performance of students in urban schools, that are taught in a familiar language and whose schools enroll high shares of advantaged students. We also find few school characteristics – other than these – that are consistently associated with higher student scores, but that within each country some school characteristics matter. While we shed light on some characteristics that affect learning across countries in the region, we conclude countries need to conduct their own analyses to identify areas for potentially effective policy interventions.

Authors

• Marlaine Lockheed, Princeton University

• Natasha de Andrade Falcao, World Bank

• Martin Moreno, Independent Consultant