A Pathway to Pay-for-Performance Teacher Motivation in Rwanda

Through a partnership between Innovations for Poverty Action, the International Growth Center, and the Rwanda Education Board, this project seeks to pilot a phased scale up of pay-for-performance (P4P) teacher contracts in Rwanda. Through enhancing new national education systems, the partnership will create the conditions necessary for the phased scale up of this evidence-informed program. The project builds on a recent randomized evaluation conducted among Rwandan public-sector primary school teachers, which showed that working under P4P contracts that offered bonuses on top of existing salaries motivated teachers to achieve better learning outcomes for students. At the request of the Rwanda Education Board (REB), the partnership will expand IPA’s technical and analytical support to enhance two new critical national education systems needed for the scale up of P4P: (a) the centralization of teacher recruitment and management and (b) national comprehensive assessments. It will also engage senior government officials to demonstrate that P4P contracts are now possible via government systems before working with REB to pilot a phased scale up of P4P teacher contracts through public systems.