Youth Impact and TaRL Africa jointly explore how practical, classroom-based tools could support teachers in adapting instruction more responsively.

This representative study of foundational skills in Botswana found that just 11 percent of standard 4 students met grade-level expectations, with substantial disparities across groups.

Youth Impact partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Philippines and the Philippines Department of Education to pilot using mobile phones to support distance learning. We highlight key lessons for implementers and policymakers to consider for education in emergency settings.

Teachers who believe in their own capabilities and that of their students can be more effective teachers. We present descriptive findings that seeing is believing: teacher beliefs are malleable.

We illustrate the benefits of A/B testing in the context of education programming in low- and middle-income countries, grounded in Youth Impact’s experience implementing A/B testing over the last seven years.

This brief describes the evidence of phone-based tutoring interventions in randomized trials in Botswana, and replicated and tested in Kenya, Nepal, India, the Philippines and Uganda.

Targeted instruction is one of the most effective educational interventions in low- and middle-income countries, yet reported impacts vary by an order of magnitude. We study this variation by aggregating evidence from prior randomized trials across five contexts, and use the results to inform a new randomized trial.

We present detailed monitoring data across a five-country randomized trial of phone-based targeted tutoring—one of the largest multicountry replication efforts in education to date.

We present results from five randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, and Uganda to evaluate the provision of education in emergency settings. We also test multiple scalable models of remote targeted tutoring instruction, comparing government and NGO delivery.

During school closures, Youth Impact tested a phone-based adaptation of TaRL for mathematics that became ConnectEd, a one-on-one tutoring program that uses phones to connect high-quality instruction with students anywhere.

In this article, we draw on our pilot testing of phone-based assessments in Botswana, along with the existing literature on oral testing of reading and mathematics, to propose a series of preliminary practical lessons to guide researchers and service providers as they try phone-based learning assessments.

A summary of a randomized controlled trial of approximately 4,500 households in Botswana during the COVID-19 pandemic conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using low-tech learning interventions during school closures.

This paper provides experimental evidence on strategies to support learning when schools close. We conduct a large-scale randomized trial testing two low-technology interventions—SMS messages and phone calls—with parents to support their child in Botswana.

This note discusses early results from a distance education program on foundational numeracy for primary school students in Nepal during COVID-19 evaluated in a randomized trial.

This report offers lessons from scaling TaRL in Botswana, a case study which provides a rich example of how an innovation developed and refined in one context can be adapted to and strategically expanded in a new location by a local organization in partnership with the government.

This paper provides some of the first experimental evidence on strategies to minimize the fallout of the pandemic on learning. We evaluate two low-technology interventions to substitute school in this period: SMS text messages and direct phone calls.

This study presents a survey of parent perspectives about children’s education. We present three main findings that have implications for education policymakers, administrators, educators, and civil society partners.