A coalition to transform learning - the case of PEC in Côte d’Ivoire

• In Event: Learning innovations developed by the Global South: "Catch up" programs in Brazil, Côte d'Ivoire, and Senegal

Proposal

The learning crisis affecting many countries across the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, did not spare Côte d’Ivoire. Despite very high school enrollment rates, many children within the Ivorian education system do not acquire foundational skills in the first few years of schooling and struggle to absorb the content in middle to upper primary. The Programme d’Analyse des Systèmes Éducatifs de la Confemen (PASEC 2019) reports that Ivorian children finish primary school with significant gaps in French and Mathematics; 59.5% of children do not have foundational reading skills, and 41.2% do not master the basic Mathematics skills.

In order to address this learning gap, the Ministry of National Education and Literacy (MENA) in Côte d’Ivoire began the process of testing a variety of evidence-based approaches in the country, in partnership with the Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities (TRECC) initiative of Jacobs Foundation. Through these pilots launched in 2018, the MENA was able to identify the most effective solutions to tackling the low learning outcomes of children in primary grades. The pilot that was identified as the most scalable and appropriate for context was that of the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach known as the Programme d’Enseignement Ciblé (PEC) in the country. Today, the MENA is working towards scaling PEC to 4,000 schools in the next few years, with an ambition to go national scale as part of their emerging strategy to improve foundational learning.

What is unique in the Ivorian case of TaRL is the collaboration amongst a variety of actors to enable the testing and scale up of the approach. In 2018, the support of TRECC enabled the MENA to identify possible models to test in the Ivorian context. The collaboration of years between J-PAL and Pratham, led J-PAL to share evidence on TaRL with the MENA, leading to the inclusion of TaRL in the bouquet of solutions to be tested. Together with IPA, TRECC was able to support the MENA to evaluate the various pilots and understand suitability to the context. In the next phase, Jacobs Foundation and cocoa company Cemoi enabled the MENA and TaRL Africa (an initiative of J-PAL and Pratham) to scale to 200 schools, later bringing on the UBS Optimus Foundation as well to enable the next stage of scale to 1,000 schools. Today, the MENA has the support of the newly-launched CLEF funding facility to scale PEC and related initiatives to a large proportion of the country. Together with these partners and the World Bank, the MENA is now launching an integrated approach to improving foundational learning across the country, expected to go to national scale in the coming years.

This presentation will give a glimpse into the structures, roles and partnerships, and relationships that enabled the success of PEC, while also outlining the scaling journey and impact of the initiative till date.

Author

• Devyani Pershad, TaRL Africa