Case Study Details - The EDISON Alliance - Improving Enrollment and Learning through Videos and Mobiles

In northern Nigeria, only half of primary school-age children attend school and only one in five people can read a whole sentence. Adverse social norms contribute to worse educational outcomes for girls and female adolescents. The median age at first marriage is 16 for females, compared to 25 for males. The COVID-19 pandemic has further weakened school systems and worsened learning poverty in developing countries. Because traditional school investments often take a long time to bear fruit, complementary home-learning approaches that can produce impacts in a shorter timeframe are needed. This is particularly true where school systems are overstretched and where adverse social norms prevent children from attending primary school. A new World Bank paper tested the effectiveness of a demand-promotion and home-learning intervention targeting 6- to 9-year-old boys and girls and their parents in Jigawa and Kano states in northern Nigeria. The study took place in communities where schools had recently received substantial grants and could absorb new students.

Impact / Outcome

Over 90 percent of invited children and parents attended the community screenings. After one year, the study showed a highly successful and cost-effective intervention. The screenings alone decreased out-of-school children by 42 percent. Despite this sharp decrease, we did not observe learning gains as expected, which highlights the many learning challenges children face in schools in northern Nigeria. On the other hand, in communities where we added the EdTech mobile reinforcer, the proportion of children scoring zero in letter recognition—the first level of the foundational skill to learn how to read—went down by almost 50 percent. The combined intervention improved both the aggregated literacy and numeracy measures by half a standard deviation—a 37 percent increase. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that similar learning gains would have taken around 5 years in the schools of our study setting.

Funding sources

Public/Private

Key Metrics

Improve school enrollment and learning outcomes through digital solutions