Purpose
Tanzanian education has faced many challenges over the years, including a lack of resources and inadequate infrastructure. One critical issue is the quality of education in the country. Twaweza implemented the KiuFunza (‘thirst for learning’ in Kiswahili) programme, with the goal of improving learning outcomes. The interventions included a school grant as well as teacher incentives, which aimed to improve the channelling of resources to public primary schools to improve the quality of public education and the learning outcomes of primary school students, respectively. Twaweza collaborated with J-PAL to design a randomised control trial of 350 public primary schools to evaluate and understand the effects of both interventions. Participating schools were randomly allocated to one of four study arms, and the interventions were rolled out in the treatment groups.
Action
From 2013 to 2018, EDI Global conducted several rounds of data collection and monitoring activities to support the impact evaluation of KiuFunza interventions. EDI Global led baseline, follow-up, and endline school and household surveys, collecting school and teacher information, as well as student and household information from randomly selected students in Standards 1 to 3. Additionally, midway through the interventions, EDI Global conducted two rounds of school monitoring visits to collect information on teacher attendance and school activities. EDI Global achieved high tracking rates (up to 99%) for students in the follow-up rounds.
Impact
EDI Global conducted a vast number of interviews with a multitude of respondents across the 10 rounds of this school survey, including:
head teacher interviews
teacher interviews.
parent interviews
student tests.
admin data surveys
The evidence collected during the project has had a lasting effect on education policies in Tanzania. For example, after Twaweza showed that it was possible and advantageous to provide student grants directly to schools, instead of going through local authorities, the government implemented this as a policy. You can read more about the impact and influence of the project here: https://twaweza.org/learning-by-doing/kiufunza/. The researchers in charge of the research and impact evaluation have also published various research outputs, including the following:
Mbiti, I., Muralidharan, K., Romero, M., Schipper, Y., Manda, C. and Rajani, R. 2019. Inputs, incentives, and complementarities in education: Experimental evidence from Tanzania. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(3), pp. 1627–1673.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/3/1627/5479257
Mbiti, I., Romero, M. and Schipper, Y. 2019. Designing effective teacher performance pay programs: experimental evidence from Tanzania (No. w25903). National Bureau of Economic Research.