Knowledge Matters – Education: Access, quality and wellbeing
This issue of Knowledge Matters captures the experiences and learning from Concern's Education Programmes, focusing on the three outcomes of access, quality and wellbeing.
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This paper documents learning from Concern's work in education across seven of the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries. Based on data from Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) surveys, progress in improving foundational literacy skills is measured.
Concern programmes have contributed to substantial and statistically significant improvements in reading fluency scores in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. However, improvements in scores are not consistent across all programmes, and only limited improvements are visible in a number of countries, particulary Liberia and Niger. Conflict and crisis within a country often result in school closure and diverting of resources away from education programmes, which was the case in Liberia with the Ebola outbreak. In Niger, baseline levels were extremely low and it took two years of investment and government support to develop a holistic bilingual literacy intervention in this resource-poor country, with improvements not seen until the final year of implementation.
The key findings of this paper are: