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.