Niger and Madagascar
JICA partners with Ministries of Education to implement a community-based institutional approach providing after-school and weekend remedial classes to improve children’s foundational skills through the “School for All” program.
Background
The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has supported the “School for All” programme in several African countries since 2004.
School for All empowers parents, communities, and schools to improve children’s education through encouraging school enrolment and providing community-led supplementary lessons in the form of the “Minimum Package for Quality Learning (PMAQ)” model. The PMAQ model has provided extra mathematics support to over 300,000 primary school children in Niger and Madagascar over the past two years. To further accelerate children’s learning, JICA is integrating the TaRL approach and has developed a model for both literacy and numeracy.
JICA has teamed up with education Ministries in Niger and Madagascar to empower SMCs and communities to improve children’s learning.
JICA works in partnership with Ministries of education in Niger and Madagascar. PMAQ provides training to School Management Committees (SMCs) and facilitators (either government teachers or community volunteers) to conduct after-school, weekend, and evening classes and study groups to help children strengthen their foundational numeracy and literacy skills. JICA has worked with Pratham and J-PAL to incorporate lessons from Teaching at the Right Level to strengthen the programme. In 2018 J-PAL, Pratham and JICA signed a memorandum of cooperation.(MOC) to provide sustainable and scalable solutions to overcome the learning crisis.
Figure 1: PDCA cycle of the TaRL-integrated PMAQ model
JICA recently investigated the impact of a package of interventions that strengthens the capacity of school management committee in utilizing information on student assessments to sensitize and mobilize parents, teachers, and community members for joint actions. The findings revealed that that the package significantly increased the percentage of schools that organized the supplementary classes of remedial activities, mobilizing voluntary contributions from the local stakeholders. It also remarkably improved basic reading and math learning in all the targeted grades. The package also increased the percentage of the grade 3 students who could read a paragraph written in the local language by 25 percentage points. Furthermore, the package decreased student dropouts and increased the transition rate to lower secondary education thus demonstrating the power of community-wide support in improving learning even in the context of a low-income country.
More information on the report can be found here.
For the school year 2021/2022, the program is expected to reach a total of over 1.6 million
- 850,000 pupils of 7,000 primary schools (2 regions), in Niger and 860,000 pupils of 7,800 primary schools (8 regions) in Madagascar.
The TaRL-integrated PMAQ is believed to have contributed to the learning progress of children in Niger and Madagascar as follows:
(Note: For the Malagasy model, the results of a randomized controlled trial are being compiled and expected to be published shortly. The draft paper can be found here.)
Figure 2-1: Learning progress in Mathematics of 850,000 primary children, Maradi & Zinder Regions, NIGER (in 2021/2022)
Figure 2-2: Learning progress in Reading of 850,000 primary children, Maradi & Zinder Regions, NIGER (in 2021/2022)
Figure 3-1: Learning progress in Mathematics of 170,000 primary children, Analamanga Region, Madagascar (in 2018/2019)
Figure 3-2: Learning progress in Reading of 170,000 primary children, Analamanga Region, Madagascar (in 2019/2020)
Children in Niger work with play money during a numeracy PMAQ class.
Photo: JICA
Interested in learning more about JICA’s TaRL-integrated model?
- See numeracy results from the Niger PMAQ programme
- Download presentation slides by JICA’s Nobuhiro Kunieda
- Watch a video about the PMAQ model
- See numeracy results from the Niger PMAQ programme
- Read a recent GPE blog post about School for All in Niger
Learn more about the TaRL Approach.
