Building government partnerships and education labs in India: insights from J-PAL South Asia

• In Event: Strengthening evidence uptake and use by governments: lessons from Education Labs

Proposal

This paper will present lessons from J-PAL South Asia’s work in establishing deep government education lab partnerships with state governments in India, particularly in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. These labs have made significant strides in encouraging scale-up of successful innovations and provided critical support in the path to scale from policy pilots to state-wide implementation.

In Karnataka, for instance, J-PAL is working with the Department of Education to scale up Ganitha-Ganaka, a new evidence-based remote tutoring program to cover 629,730 students in grades 3-5, in collaboration with Alokit and Youth Impact. J-PAL is also supporting the roll-out of Maru Sinchana program, a targeted instruction curriculum for secondary school, based on a program previously tested in Odisha by J-PAL affiliated researchers. Simultaneously, in Andhra Pradesh J-PAL is supporting the state government in scaling up an evidence-based early childhood education curriculum, while also evaluating an innovative classroom observation tool designed to improve teacher performance. These partnerships, with their focus on evidence co-creation and use, both support governments in piloting and evaluating innovative programs and have been a vehicle for the adaptation and at-scale implementation of evidence-based programs.

This paper will showcase 3 broad sets of findings. The first set includes key lessons emerging from our work in establishing these labs: (a) the importance of building champions and supporters at various levels in the government; (b) aligning our proposals to government budgetary and policymaking timelines; (c) applying principles of generalisability when bringing evidence from one context to another; and (d) how long-term, and deep work can help shift government priorities towards using evidence that extends beyond one-off projects. Senior government officials have much shorter tenures in any given position, relative to typical evidence generation timelines; therefore, having formal agreements and building partnerships at multiple levels in key departments has ensured the longevity of partnerships.

The second set of findings pertains to policy timelines: especially when considering scale-ups, aligning the timeline of outreach to state budget compilation has been extremely effective in policy take-up. A key challenge faced in advocating for evidence generation and use is about the application of evidence from one context to another. Through the work done across states, the paper will showcase how J-PAL has been able to develop processes and metrics that can help in testing applicability of the innovation to new contexts.

The third set of findings hinges on lab set up, institutionalisation and sustainability with key recommendations. This underscores the importance of setting up labs such that they have some form of permanence and deep engagements. Isolated projects rarely lead to systemic change in how governments make decisions and therefore, it becomes important to provide multiple types of support across projects. J-PAL’s partnerships focus on evidence generation, use, dissemination and capacity building to meet the varied needs of governments, which help sustain these partnerships.

Authors

• Urvashi Wattal, J-PAL South Asia

• Sharanya Chandran, JPal South Asia at IFMR