Zambia

We study Zambia’s government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. A randomized trial estimates its effects on literacy and numeracy, on the transfer of targeted skills to adjacent domains, and on later exam performance. Alongside it, 78 in-depth interviews with education personnel combine thematic coding with unsupervised machine learning to explore what drives teachers to change their instructional practices.

There is limited evidence on what drives teachers to change their teaching practices. Using primary qualitative data from 78 Zambian …