LEARNING ALLIANCE

STARTED: Incubation Program February-March 2024

Co-founder

CE INCUBATION GRANT: $173,000

MONEY FUNDRAISED TO DATE (Aug 2024): $173,000

TEAM SIZE (Aug 2024): 2 FT

Co-founder

Simplifying teaching to maximise learning

DESCRIPTION OF THE INTERVENTION

Learning Alliance is a non-profit that tackles the foundational learning crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa by bringing evidence-based teaching practices into classrooms and supporting teachers in delivering an excellent education to every child. We aim to scale our impact by partnering with schools and Ministries of Education, focusing on operational excellence, scalability, and cost-effectiveness to achieve the ultimate goal: more learning.
Structured Pedagogy is an evidence-based approach to improve learning outcomes by helping teachers be more effective. It involves providing simple, daily lesson plans for teachers to follow, training, and ongoing coaching to use the new techniques.
Learning Alliance has identified excellent open-source structured pedagogy material. We plan to adapt these for schools in neglected geographies by developing highly cost-effective scaling models to scale these tools and practices nationally.

BACKGROUND OF THE INTERVENTION

Most students in Sub-Saharan Africa attend school but learn very little. For instance, 86% are unable to read with comprehension by the end of primary school. Math skills are similarly far behind (The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update). This limits their life prospects: a meta-analysis studying the effect of skills on income suggests that a one standard deviation increase in test scores leads to a 10-45% increase in individual income (Hanushek et al., 2016). In other words, the path out of poverty - for individual children and their countries - likely runs through an effective classroom.
The scale of this challenge is vast, and so is the opportunity: There are roughly 500 million children under the age of 15 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Researchers have identified evidence-based solutions like structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level, which can significantly impact at a relatively low cost. These solutions still need to reach most children and schools.

NEAR-TERM PLANS:

We are currently doing desk research, making calls with experts, and conducting country visits to identify the geographic areas where Learning Alliance can best contribute and learn from existing organizations.
We will begin in-country work with 2-3 schools in September 2024, aiming to partner with schools throughout the fall semester to test and iterate our program model.
In the spring semester, we will pilot a small-scale program in 5-10 public schools to measure learning outcomes while refining our program’s approach.
By the end of the spring semester in 2025, we hope to have shown promising indications of a substantial impact on learning outcomes, which we will use to scale to 50-100 schools in year 2, focusing on refining program design for impact, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. We hope to conduct an RCT in year 2 or 3.

PREDICTED IMPACT:

A strong body of evidence (Snilstveit et al., 2015) shows a large and consistent impact of Structured Pedagogy on learning outcomes. A multi-year, nationwide study in Kenya found that Structured Pedagogy increased learning by 0.83 standard deviations, significantly affecting education.
Beyond learning outcomes, there is high-quality evidence that improved educational outcomes lead to substantial income improvements for participants; a one standard deviation increase in test scores leads to a 10-45% increase in individual income (Hanushek et al., 2016).

COST-EFFECTIVENESS:

Our cost-effectiveness analysis projects an increase of $189 in students’ lifetime income for every $1 spent. This is equivalent to the benefit of 35x cash transfers per GiveWell donation.
This intervention has the potential to be extremely cost-effective because it is highly leveraged: African governments have spent considerable sums to build schools and employ teachers, with relatively little investment in quality. Thus, small investments in teacher effectiveness and leveraging existing school spending can deliver large learning gains.

ROOM FOR MORE FUNDING IN 2023:

Learning Alliance currently has a runway of 14 months. This will allow us to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the program in partnership with 2-3 schools and set up a small-scale pilot program in the 2025 spring semester. We will use additional funding to increase the scale of the pilot and control group in the spring semester to measure outcomes robustly and hire extra staff to allow us to move faster towards a scalable model of our program in years 2 and 3.