Impact Evaluation of Tayari School Readiness Program in Kenya: Endline Report Long Version

Abstract

This report describes the endline findings of an external evaluation of the Tayari preschool program. Tayari is an early childhood development and education (ECDE) pilot intervention in Kenya funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). The RTI International implemented the pilot, in partnership with Kenya’s Ministry of Education (MoE) and the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) who evaluated the pilot. The program, which ran from November 2014 to July 2018, aimed to develop a cost-effective and scalable model of ECDE that would ensure that children who join Standard 1 are cognitively, physically, socially and emotionally ready to start, and succeed in primary school. The program focused on improving learners’ knowledge and skills in literacy, numeracy, health and hygiene as well as psychosocial skills. It targeted pre-primary (herein used interchangeably with preschool) school children in ECDE centers in four counties in Kenya: Laikipia, Nairobi, Siaya and Uasin Gishu. Both public and Alternative Provision of Basic Education and Training (APBET) ECDE centers were targeted in Nairobi while only public centers were targeted in the other three counties. As the program’s external evaluator, APHRC’s role in Tayari was mainly to assess the impact of the program on preparing children for primary school and to assess the cost-effectiveness of the program. The evaluation, which adopted a randomized control trial (RCT) design, involved three separate treatment groups and one control group for each type (public and APBET) of ECDE center or school. The first treatment group (T1) received two components of the intervention – teacher training and classroom instructional support; the second treatment group (T2) received the two components in the first treatment plus the provision of instructional materials component (consisting of learner workbooks, teachers’ guides, and other instructional materials); the third treatment group (T3) received all three components in the second treatment group, plus a health component. The control group (T0) received no treatment but will receive the components shown to work after completion of the piloting phase in 2018. In order to examine the effects of duration of exposure to the Tayari intervention and to save on costs, half the number of schools required to detect the required effect size were added in the study in 2016 (referred to as “Phase 1” schools), and the other half were added in 2017 (referred to as “Phase 2” schools) – meaning that the 2017 endline study covered in this report had a full sample needed to detect the stipulated mean effect size based on study estimates. This also means that Phase 1 schools were exposed to the intervention for two years while Phase 2 schools were exposed for one year, before the end term evaluation was conducted.