Hi John,

Let me tell you about Ama, a 10-year-old girl who lives in the Afram Plains, a remote district of Ghana. After four years in primary school, she was still unable to read a basic text. She was among some 250 million primary school age children around the world who are placed in a class based on their age but lack the reading, writing, and numeracy skills to keep up. Many fall further and further behind.

But Ama had an opportunity to participate in targeted instruction, where students are grouped together based on their learning level rather than by their age or grade, then taught with level-appropriate learning activities and materials. By receiving targeted instruction, Ama started learning how to blend sounds to form words until she could read an entire passage.

This isn’t just an anecdote: targeted instruction is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve learning. How do we know that? Because for many years IPA and our partners have been testing different strategies to improve learning and examining their impacts at scale. In Ghana, these efforts have led to the first investment in an African government-led scale-up of targeted instruction to 10,000 primary schools across Ghana, reaching over 2 million students.

This is a great success, but a billion children are still out of school due to COVID-19 restrictions and vulnerable children are falling even further behind. Getting children and teachers safely back into school (and learning while there) is critical. This is why IPA is working with government partners and international efforts like the Save Our Future Campaign to call for implementing more evidence-based strategies like targeted instruction over the months to come.

We hope you will consider supporting IPA as we work to push forward an evidence-based response to the current crisis.