The Market for Tutors in Pakistan: Understanding it’s Role and Potential Impact During the Covid-19 Pandemic

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic will have lasting effects on millions of children in Pakistan, worsening the already critical pre-pandemic “learning crisis." This project will investigate the ability of tutoring services to address this learning crisis and losses due to the pandemic and serve as an important complement to schooling even as schools reopen. The proposed pilot will confirm our understanding of the role of tutoring during the pandemic by conducting a follow-up to a 2019 household and tutor survey that established the existence of a sizable market for group-based private tutoring. This analysis, combined with further fieldwork and small-scale experiments, will help refine the design and implementation of the proposed interventions aimed at improving the accessibility and effectiveness of tutoring services. Finalized interventions will then be rolled out and tested at-scale in the subsequent full study.