Catch Up Pilot Program

Despite almost universal primary school enrollment in Zambia, many students fail to learn basic skills. In 2016, the Zambia Ministry of Education collaborated with J-PAL Africa to launch a pilot of the Zambia Catch Up Program in 80 schools, which was modeled after interventions that had been found effective through several randomized evaluations in India, Ghana, and Kenya. J-PAL Africa, IPA Zambia, and UNICEF conducted an independent process monitoring of the pilot program to ensure that the program could be successfully implemented in accordance with its theory of change. After refining the model that was best for their school system, the Ministry committed to scaling the approach to approximately 1,800 schools across Zambia over three years in August 2017 with funding from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures and USAID Zambia. This partnership was also supported by IPA, Pratham, UNICEF, VVOB, and Zambia Education Sector Support Technical Assistance (ZESSTA). For more on Teaching at the Right Level in India, see this scale-up story and this December 2017 op-ed in Livemint by J-PAL South Asia Executive Director Shobhini Mukerji and Pratham CEO Rukmini Banerji. For more on the Catch Up program in Zambia, see this blog post from January 2018 and this set of videos produced by Pratham, J-PAL Africa, the Zambian Ministry of General Education.

*This project was funded across two funding cycles under IGI's predecessor initiative, the Government Partnerships Initiative (GPI).