Community-Led Learning as a scalable and sustainable innovation to mitigate lost learning in Uganda

• In Event: Equity and Inclusion in Education: What Role for Remediation?

Proposal

The Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Learning (SESIL) Community-Led Learning (CLL) initiative in Uganda provides a remedial strategy for foundational literacy and numeracy that can support the most vulnerable children at scale. It is a model that tests the following questions: can largely untrained volunteers effectively raise foundational literacy and numeracy of early grade children using highly structured lesson plans? And can the low-cost initiative be rolled out at scale and grow beyond the support of a project?

SESIL is a 5-year programme, funded by UKAID, Education Above All and the Luminos Fund, and managed by Cambridge Education, which supports the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda to strengthen the effectiveness of the education system and improve literacy and numeracy in the early grades.

CLL is driven by communities, operating alongside schools and has reached over 330,000 children to date. An impact assessment was conducted between January – May 2022, with a representative sample of 93,000 children who completed a 4-month cycle of CLL lessons. A logistic regression analysis demonstrated that CLL classes were effective for both boys and girls, children of different ages and children with and without disabilities, with children. A child who attended CLL classes more than doubled their probability of improving their literacy level than a child who did not attend CLL. Qualitative studies also demonstrated that there was high demand, ownership and leadership of the CLL initiative from communities and local officials, other children also improved literacy and numeracy skills due to tutoring from their siblings enrolled in CLL, local school leaders took the initiative to partner with CLL centres and actively champion the activity, and there were improvements in children’s interest in learning and confidence to learn / express themselves.

As CLL continues to scale, a further quasi-experimental impact assessment of a cohort of children attending CLL will be complete by September 2023, alongside additional qualitative studies. The session will consider the key questions above by presenting these most recent quantitative and qualitative research on the initiative. It will reflect on the trade-offs and opportunities of working at scale, and how local governments have adapted CLL, as SESIL withdraws support, to create pathways to a truly sustainable model of community engagement in children’s learning.

Author

• Aggie Nakirya, Cambridge Education