Giving Compass' Take:

•  Co-Impact, a global philanthropic collaborative, announced that it would provide funding to five initiatives that are working on education systems change in Africa. 

• What are the root issues in access to education in Africa that a systems change approach will help address? 

• Read about the roots of philanthropic systems change. 

Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) Africa, led jointly by MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Indian NGO Pratham, was selected as one of the five initiatives receiving funding under this commitment. TaRL Africa was selected after rigorous assessment from an initial pool of over 250 initiatives.

Despite progress worldwide in school enrollment, millions of children in schools across Africa are not acquiring basic reading and arithmetic skills. The Co-Impact grant will support J-PAL's policy team and Pratham in working with governments and their partners to scale up the Teaching at the Right Level approach in multiple countries across Africa. This complements a burgeoning movement of players and programs in Africa committed to addressing the learning crisis through TaRL.

Shifting from "schooling for all" to "learning for all" also requires critical systems-level support. This includes working with stakeholders to adjust the approach to local contexts, developing and supporting a cadre of mentors, and continually assessing basic skills and empowering government officials and teachers to act on this data.

Since 2001 J-PAL-affiliated researchers have tested the TaRL approach through rigorous impact evaluations. Six randomized evaluations in India over the past two decades and a growing body of research in Africa have shown that TaRL has led to some of the largest and cost-effective learning gains of any primary education program evaluated.

The five-year Co-Impact grant enables the J-PAL/Pratham team to continue to support the scale-up of TaRL and reach at least three million students--and potentially millions more in the future.

Read the full article about education systems change by Latif Jameel at EurekAlert! Science News