CGD Podcast: Rethinking How to Boost Learning in Africa with Kwame Akyeampong and Rachel Glennerster

David Evans: Hello, and welcome to The CGD Podcast. I'm David Evans, senior fellow and education program director here at the Center for Global Development, and I am very excited about today's conversation. Here's a number you've probably heard. In lower- and middle-income countries, roughly 7 out of 10 children cannot read and understand a simple story by the age of 10. The field calls this the learning crisis. I'll note that the most recent results from the international assessment PISA show that learning outcomes are dropping in high-income countries as well.

What if that framing of crisis, of deficit, of children being behind is itself part of the problem? That's the argument of a new book, Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa, by Kwame Akyeampong and his co-author, Sean Higgins. Drawing on decades of fieldwork, it makes a provocative case. The crisis doesn't live in African children or teachers or communities. It lives in the policy response. The book takes on some of the field's biggest questions: why so many children are taught in languages they don't understand, why we've defined learning so narrowly around literacy and numeracy scores, and why teachers are handed scripts instead of trust.

It grounds all of this in three accelerated learning programs in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Liberia, where children who had dropped out of school entirely catch up on years of learning in a matter of months in their own languages with teachers drawn from their own communities. I'm joined by two guests today. Kwame Akyeampong is professor of international education and development at the Open University and co-author of the book. Rachel Glennerster is president of the Center for Global Development.

What makes this conversation especially interesting is that both are members of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, which commissioned the Smart Buys 2023 Report, arguably the field's best-known guide to what works in education. Today, we'll explore where Kwame's book and the evidence consensus agree and where they pull apart. Kwame, before this was a book, it was decades of fieldwork in Ghana, in Ethiopia, in Liberia. Can you point to any single classroom moment that convinced you that this learning crisis framing was itself part of the problem?

Kwame Akyeampong: It wasn't a particular classroom moment, but really a series of observations that I made on looking at out-of-school children who had been introduced to an accelerated learning program. The fact that they were making so much progress in developing their literacy and numeracy skills really puzzled me. Also, the ways in which they were engaging very actively in learning were something I had not seen in many classrooms that I've observed. It really struck me that perhaps the lens through which I'm looking at these children and their learning is probably a lens that I need to reexamine. It is just seeing this rather exceptional performance of these children who were school dropouts. That really struck me as something significant.

David Evans: Rachel, you and Kwame worked together on the 2023 Smart Buys Report. What struck or stayed with you most about the book? Where did it resonate with what you've seen in the research and your experience?

Rachel Glennerster: I have interacted with Kwame in lots of different forays and TaRL Africa board as well. The conversations I've had with Kwame over the years and the book have completely changed how I write and talk about education. In particular, I now try and frame things as about potential and hope and progress rather than about crisis. There is so much research on the damage that can be done to children from lower expectations, from people assuming that they can't do things.

So much evidence that teaching aspirations, giving people a sense that they can do things, is really effective at improving outcomes, not just in education, but elsewhere. As economists, we know the evidence, and yet we don't take it into account in what we do ourselves when we talk about this. We should take seriously our own work, showing that aspirations matter, that the perceptions of teachers matter about kids, the perceptions of the system about what is possible, and take that into account in how we talk about the issue.

We all know every one of us who has talked about the learning crisis, and you and I are part of that, Dave; every one of us has seen that children in the right situations can learn and learn fast and well in the right environments. We should be putting that forward as the potential and the hope rather than focusing on what can't be done or what hasn't been done in the past.

David Evans: This is a fabulous point. As one of the co-authors of the World Development Report 2018, which was one of the sources popularizing the "learning crisis" term, a lot of the thinking there was if we use this term "learning crisis," we can get an attention to this topic. Hopefully, we can draw resources to this topic that weren't there before. I think both of you highlight this fact that there can be real, potential, damaging side effects, even if that framing does achieve some of what it's intended to. Kwame, I want to bring it back to you. I think we would all agree that most children in schools are not learning to their full potential. If that's the case, then what damage do we do with this learning crisis framing?

Kwame Akyeampong: The book really is a reflection of my own career and the journey that I've been on since 1991. My first engagement with assessing children's learning in the early grades was when I worked with a USAID team where we tested children in grades 1 to 3. Back then, I saw the problem. It's being described today as the crisis that children were actually not achieving the levels at which they were supposed to achieve. This has been a message that has been repeated time and again.

My frustration with it, which led to the book, was: why do we have this problem persisting? Then we offer solutions which do not seem to correct it, to address this problem. I've come to the point in my work that I become a little bit dissatisfied, and I wanted a solution. I wanted to understand what was happening. Yet, when I went to classrooms and we did the research time and again, we just saw the problem. Our students really not reading and doing basic math. I think the problem of the crisis has been there for a long time, and I would agree that the children aren't learning enough, as the crisis puts it.

I think by calling this a learning crisis, what, for me, it has done over the years was to keep my gaze away from the processes that are needed to reengage these children into positive learning. The key thing is that the learning crisis focuses, I think, quite strongly on deficits. Once you begin to construct a problem in deficit terms, it leads you onto a path where you begin to frame responses that address the deficit and not the potential. There's a lot of prescription, and I do agree with Rachel. What we've done in the Global Education Advisory Panel is to signal that there is indeed a problem, and then we provide the evidence of that.

I think what we are often missing is also understanding that what we call in the book the so-called crisis really is also leading us into directions which are limiting the kind of responses that would take us out of this crisis. It leads to very simplistic solutions that really hide underlying structural constraints that produce and sustain the poor learning outcomes. I think this is where the language of crisis creates a problem for us. In the book, we argue that, yes, there is a crisis or a learning crisis, but I think we need to be careful the way in which we frame it.

David Evans: One of the things that you mentioned early in the book is that framing as a learning crisis lends itself very much towards a solution that is focused on measurement. Let's measure learning outcomes more. We don't have enough of that. We have to fill that gap. I'm a researcher. Obviously, I'm always going to believe that better measurement is going to help us, but how could reframing away from this crisis mentality, how could that change how the field of global education sets its goals and looks forward to solutions?

Kwame Akyeampong: There's a tension that we need to grapple with. The measurement is important. Whilst we've been quite provocative in the book in really questioning some of the overemphasis on the measurement, we are not denying that it's important, but I think we need to expand that horizon. Measuring the literacy and numeracy challenges helps us to know what the problem is. As you said at the beginning of this podcast, many children are not able to read and comprehend a simple passage by the age of 10.

We need to know that, so the measurement is important, but we have to make sure that we are balancing this measurement with a wider understanding of the issues that contribute to that. Using the word "learning crisis," which then leads us defining the crisis narrowly in terms of cognitive measurement of literacy and numeracy. Unfortunately, it leads us onto this path, which overshadows the structural and the other issues that I've talked about, which we think are very important.

What really helped us to see this was when we looked at the accelerated learning programs in the three countries you mentioned. Now, these children were also achieving highly as far as literacy and numeracy were concerned. We measured it, we tested it, so we are acknowledging that, but we're always saying that the environment in which that was achieved is what we are missing. The environment in which children learn, where they're coming from, and the factors which shape their learning.

We need to pay more attention to that, because that is what is sustainable over the long term. I think if we did that, we would combine the insights from the measurement with other insights to produce responses that have a better chance of solving this problem. It is only in Africa that we seem to be making the least progress, and this worries me. We are still being held back, and we need to find a way out of this.

I think this is where we are particularly lacking when it comes to the measurement issue. If you go to a doctor and he tells you, "Here is your problem," it's important to know that, but it's important what you do about it. In the case of children, you need to do a lot more than just simply measuring it. You need to do more than that, and that's the argument we make in the book.

David Evans: I think that's a point well made. Rachel, you wanted to come in?

Rachel Glennerster: Yes. Often, children know a huge amount that is not captured in tests, and these accelerated learning programs use that to help them learn other things. This really reminded me when I was reading it of the work by Abhijit Banerjee and others, showing that there are children who dropped out of school and they work in markets. They can do phenomenally complicated math in calculating change from someone who's bought three different vegetables at different prices, but give that child a standard math test that we would put in some of our studies, and they will do really badly.

Give the children who do well in that standard expertocratic test. They do well in that, but give them an actual market problem, and they can't do it at all. We've documented this. This is why we have to go beyond our standard thinking about measurement. We need to, as the book eloquently says, take on board the things that children do know and use that and make what we do in schools relevant to the market, because what is the point of learning to do school math if it doesn't translate into market math? What a waste that we are failing to capture the fact that kids can do market math in what we teach in schools.

David Evans: It's an excellent point that goes back to the Brazilian education scholar Paulo Freire, that if we do not invest in education being deeply relevant, and this goes back to Kwame's point about the importance of understanding the wider context that children are working in, then we will have failed. This importance of context and conditions brings me to the next question I want to ask you, Rachel, which is a part of this book critiques what it calls the expert view of education, including the World Bank's own World Development Report and its approach on learning poverty. By most measures, you are arguably a leading representative of this expert tradition. Is there anything in this book that would have you rethink the role of experts like yourself, like me, like others?

Rachel Glennerster: I was reading this section, and I'm sure, somewhat like Hugh, I was thinking, "Hang on, this is criticizing all the things that I've worked for over many years." Then I would think, "I deeply respect Kwame. I know that, actually, we think very similarly." I pursued. I kept going. I tried not to take it personally. I looked at the practical recommendations that came out of this section, that's in that section that criticizes the expert view. What are the practical recommendations?

Teach children where they are. Teach in a way that engages children. Avoid capital punishment. Understand that children come with a lot of knowledge that you can draw on. Make the learning useful to them. These are all things which the quantitative RCT people who wrote the WR would completely agree with. This is what is so brilliant, I think, about working with Kwame is we come from very different perspectives and traditions and methodologies, but we end up actually at the same place. It's made me think about how I talk about this.

I do think we have to take seriously this measurement problem, that our measurement doesn't capture a lot of the things that children do know. I take this criticism of that outside expert technographic view of education as these curricula that fail children because they don't take into account where they are and their life experiences, and what they do know. It's criticism of saying you learn the school math, and the fact that this abstract school math doesn't translate into what children read. Kwame should come in and see if he agrees with my interpretation of this.

David Evans: Kwame, is Rachel being too easy on the experts or too hard on the experts?

Kwame Akyeampong: I really agree with what Rachel is saying. I think one of the things that has hampered our research community is the way in which we have not tended to work together and understand the traditions, the methodologies that we use. Like Rachel said, the conclusions that we reach in the book are not very different from conclusions that I know RCT researchers and others also reach.

It's important that we can reach similar conclusions, even though we are looking at it from a different methodological standpoint. For me, this book is a call for us to work much more closely together and respect the experts and the practitioners, and all those who are involved. This is an endeavor for all of us. I really value the measurement, the contribution of that, what the expert view brings about this crisis, but to also say, "Wait a minute. Can we widen this?" We are more likely to achieve the results we want if we take on board a wider view.

What we were doing does not deny the view of these expert views, but actually complements and contributes so that we get a much more expansive approach. This is what we were aiming for, and hopefully that this would encourage us to include more qualitative research. Evidence is one thing, but how do you nudge people to really implement the evidence? You've got to understand the context. You've got to understand what is it that makes people behave in a certain way. I think this book is signaling the importance of this endeavor.

David Evans: Seeking those complementarities, I think, is absolutely crucial. I want to come to an important topic you address in the book: language of instruction. The World Bank estimates that millions of children are taught in a language that they do not speak at home, that they often do not understand. They're trying to learn to read at the same time that they're trying to learn this other language that they're learning to read in.

The evidence of teaching children in a language that they already understand, that they speak at home, is old, and it's pretty consistent that children learn better in a language they already speak. One of the things that has struck me again and again in country after country is that parents across countries will pay to get their children to be taught in English, in French, or Portuguese. They push back hard against mother-tongue instruction policies, as they're sometimes called. Kwame, how do you believe policymakers should weigh the evidence on the learning gains from mother-tongue instruction against this genuine parental demand? Is there any way to reconcile these?

Kwame Akyeampong: There are two issues I want to raise here in response to this question. One is that evidence alone is not enough. This is particularly so in the language and instruction evidence. The evidence that when children learn in their mother tongue, they are able to make a better transition to the second language is strong. It is not the evidence. It is how that evidence informs policy.

Now, there are challenges to actually implementing this in policy. I think that when parents want their children to either be taught in English, French, or Portuguese, it is so because they believe that learning these languages, irrespective of the evidence we present to them, right from the start of schooling, offers them an advantage. Now, that belief is strong. Where are they getting that belief from?

Often, when they look at the middle class, they look at the towns and cities and children who have a background in English. Why are we being asked to learn in the mother tongue when this is going to be a problem for us? It is not what the evidence strongly suggests, as I've said. I think we should do a better job at helping parents to see that mother-tongue instruction produces benefits that enhance the international language development.

This is why I have a challenge because, yes, in the experiment, we know the evidence, but the reality is that it's much more complex. Many African school systems, children come from different language backgrounds. How do you actually put this into practice? That is where the problem is. We have to convince parents that this is really the case. I understand fully when I go into the villages and towns to do my research.

These parents insist that they want to learn in English, no matter what you say about the evidence because they don't see progress in that respect. Telling parents that what the evidence shows is not going to change their attitudes, unless we can show concretely how this is true in the schools their children attend. Now, I think this is the weak implementation of this evidence or the weak policy response that continues to foster this belief. That's another challenge.

We need to understand, if you have a classroom where there are five or six different languages spoken by children, how do you actually use the mother tongue? I don't think we've done enough research to really understand how we do this. I think the evidence that we have generated, yes, is true. If you come to African settings, it is very complex when it comes to implementation. I think it's the reason why we have parents pushing back because it's not the experience. I think we need to do a better job in translating that evidence into policy and practice.

David Evans: I think this point that we have great evidence that teaching in mother tongue is effective, but the evidence on how to do that most effectively, how to transition across languages and when to do that is much, much weaker. Now, something that Kwame pointed to was this question that, depending on the country, there may be lots of variation in languages.

In some countries, you have dozens of languages. South Africa, Zambia, many others, including some that have very little written literature available. Now, Rachel, the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel just recently put out a literacy study that tackles that, among other issues. How do we reconcile the evidence on reading gains with these complicated operational realities?

Rachel Glennerster: Yes, it's definitely a challenge. I just want to reiterate, though, why it's so important. If you think about phonics, which this paper was also about as part of how we teach children to read, you're sounding out sounds. Then, in a sense, you're guessing what word it is that those sounds give you. Well, if you don't know the word that you're guessing, at the end of the day, you can't do that. It just doesn't work. That's why it's important.

Now, I know there are really complicated situations, but let's start with the basics. There are a lot of places around the world, in Africa or in South Asia, where there are whole provinces or districts that the vast majority speak a language. There may be other districts that speak another language. At the moment, too often the Center sends teachers out irrespective of whether they happen to know the local language because it's all done centrally.

Again, this is what I think of when Kwame is talking about the experts, like some expert in the Center sends this teacher who's an expert in pedagogy but doesn't know anything about the local language and the local knowledge. We can change that by saying, "No, you send someone who actually knows the local language." Then there are the cases I'm familiar with in West Africa. You will have maybe five different languages in a district, but it's all sorted by village.

The Mandingo, for example, is spread across West Africa, but they tend to be in Mandinka villages. Maybe there aren't very many trained teachers with teaching certificates who speak that language, but use someone from the local community as an assistant to help. Then you have the problem that there are these cases where there are five languages in the same classroom. Now, even there, I would say it's better to teach in a language that they are at least hearing around the community than French or English.

I worked in Burkina Faso, and there were many different languages in the rural areas, but basically, no one in a rural community is fluent in French. No one is speaking French to each other. They don't listen to the radio in French. French is just not something that you hear around. Don't teach them in French. Even if it's the language that their neighbor speaks, at least they come across it. It's complex, but I think there's a way through.

David Evans: Exactly. There's a middle path. It's not always the language that every child speaks at home, but still a language that's familiar. Kwame?

Kwame Akyeampong: I was recently invited to look at an early learning program in northern Ghana. I was amazed at what I saw. This speaks to the problem of translating from evidence to policy and practice. Now, in these communities that I visited, I spent some time in these classrooms. These were poorer communities. The mothers in these communities had been trained by the teachers in the district to teach basic literacy and basic numeracy.

The mothers were spending an hour and a half every morning with 25 of the children; this is a government public school, while the other children played with the teacher outside and taking through the basics. These were illiterate or semi-literate women, but they were using the language that they were speaking with their children right in the classroom. The teachers were saying this really enabled them to build on that. These children were picking up the basics using the mothers who were being trained and supported.

I saw these mothers working in these classrooms, and the children were really like-- these were people they knew in the community. I think we need to be a bit more creative and look at ways in which we can take this and expand it, because sometimes you post a teacher to a place, and the teacher doesn't want to go there because he doesn't come from that community. Why don't we use people in the community who speak the language, give them a little bit of training, and help them work alongside teachers, especially in the early grades, to really build a foundation upon which the teachers can work?

David Evans: I think that creative solution is going to be absolutely crucial. Now, Kwame, you opened the podcast talking about seeing these children and youth in these accelerated learning programs. Children who had dropped out of school, who would be the epitome, arguably, of what has been framed as the learning crisis, but gaining enormous knowledge. That's really the heart of the book. These three accelerated learning programs: Complementary Basic Education in Ghana, Speed Schools in Ethiopia, Second Chance in Liberia, dropouts catching up years of schooling in just months. What do you think explains the success of these programs?

Kwame Akyeampong: Three things stand out for me. One is that we saw children who were very expressive, much more agency. Many people would typically describe children when they visit classrooms in many African contexts as rather passive. We saw in this classroom real agency of children, in fact, overshadowing the teachers. This was because of this expanded view of learning. They were learning basic literacy and numeracy in ways in which they could bring their own experiences and knowledge into the classroom space.

I think one of the reasons why there is this success is this holistic approach to learning. We need to expand that. We shouldn't sacrifice what we are doing in terms of making sure we are teaching at the right level and all the other things that research says is effective. We need to be mindful of the environment in which this happens. This holistic approach to learning, which, by the way, is inclusive of strong development of basic literacy and numeracy skills, was a key factor.

The second was their pedagogical approach, not treating children in purely deficit terms. It's an argument we make repeatedly in the book. I think we should take this message very seriously. Look, children are naturally creative and naturally inquisitive. You go into a classroom in any African setting. All of a sudden, these children don't have a voice. There's a chorus response to the teacher. You go outside, you see them, and they are different children.

What is it that we do to them when they come into the classroom that really stifles this creativity, this imagination, this engagement? I think taking away this deficit and giving these children agency was a key factor, and the reason why this was working. The third one is what we've just been talking about. The language that children are familiar. These children are able to communicate, engage with the teacher, with each other, because this is the language they speak at home.

They're familiar with the language, so they're able to express themselves. This is not rocket science, but we don't seem to emphasize this sufficiently. A child who's come to the classroom for the first time, it's an alien environment if you start speaking in a language that they are not familiar. I think these are the three ingredients which really make these programs transformative.

David Evans: Thank you so much. I want to emphasize that we also have traditional quantitative evidence complementing this narrative that Kwame is laying out that these catch-up programs can be incredibly effective, can drive big learning gains. Rachel, one of the provocative implications of the book is that the accelerated learning programs that the children these programs rescued were first failed by public schools.

Now, you have a lot of experience over the years of trying to integrate programs that have been effective with a lot of external nonprofit support, integrating those into government schools. Should ministries be trying to fold these three principles that Kwame just described into the mainstream education system, or is this second-chance sector valuable precisely because it sits outside of the mainstream education system?

Rachel Glennerster: We need both, but I absolutely think that there are principles that can and should be brought into mainstream schools. I've done a lot of work with Teaching at the Right Level, and particularly Teaching at the Right Level Africa, which mainly works with government. This is a program which was developed by an NGO in India, and I first evaluated it as an out-of-school program. It was a school for kids trying to catch up. It was a recognition that things weren't working well in the mainstream schools.

You could train local people, and they could help children catch up very rapidly in the same way that Kwame has described. Both in India, but particularly in Africa, there's been a lot of work to try and take some of those principles into the schools. Because this way of thinking and this way of teaching is so different to what's been drilled into teachers for so long, it's still the case that TaRL Africa mainly protects a specific time of day when you do things differently, because it is so hard to change the whole system.

The hope is that this will feed into other things that teachers are doing. Now, there's work to try and integrate these principles into grades 1 and 2 before children have already fallen behind. I think there are principles you can take into the mainstream schools. However, one of the key things which these accelerated learning programs were designed for is children who've dropped out for many years. I don't think mainstream schools are very good at helping them and integrating them.

I do think there is room and need for programs that are outside schools that get them caught up so that they can then integrate. It was just very moving to read the stories of children who'd gone through this process and gone back into mainstream schools and felt confident and on top of the material because of what they'd learned out of it. We should bring in the principles, but for a long time, unfortunately, there will still be the children who are years behind. We need to keep going with those programs.

David Evans: Kwame?

Kwame Akyeampong: I totally agree with what Rachel has said. I think one of the things we try to raise in the book is for governments in Africa to see why they have a problem in the first place. Children who have dropped out of school need a second chance. It's absolutely crucial. It's also pointing a finger at why our public schools are failing these children. It is a call for them to re-examine what they're doing and to think through how they can make things better, learning from the examples of the accelerated learning programs.

David Evans: I agree. There's a tension that I want to make sure we get to. Kwame, the report on the most cost-effective ways to boost learning, the Smart Buys that you co-chaired, rates structured pedagogy, which usually includes detailed lesson plans for teachers, as a great buy, a very cost-effective way to boost learning. Yet, your book warns that scripted lessons can de-professionalize teachers. It doesn't take advantage of teachers' creativity. There's reading from a script. What's the line between a structure that supports a teacher, potentially a teacher who has not been well-trained, not through any fault of their own, and a structure that de-professionalizes teachers?

Kwame Akyeampong: This is very dear to my heart, because teacher education and professional learning is really at the center of my work. I think the evidence about structured pedagogy is very clear, and it does produce the outcomes that we are looking for. If you have teachers who are low-skilled teachers, they need structure. They need those guidance to do that. The wider argument we make about the book is that this cannot replace a system that needs to produce teachers that can think and work through this.

The call is to say, look, when we give teachers scripts or whatever it is, let us really use this as an opportunity to also engage their minds so that the teacher can make sense of what is happening, and that can improve their own professional practice. We've done very well in the evidence and the structured pedagogy, but let's not sideline the teacher. However limited the teacher's professional knowledge is, we should use this opportunity to also invest in it because that's the future.

No developed system that works well gives teachers scripts to teach. It's important, but we need to be on a pathway that really leads us to creating more autonomous teachers, and that may take time. For now, maybe, yes, we need these structured pedagogical approaches, but let's do more research to understand how teachers interpret this. How do they adapt this? How do they innovate this? That's the call that the book is making.

David Evans: When we think about the best education systems in the world, we don't think about heavily scripted lessons. Making sure that we are on the road to fabulous education systems is crucial. Rachel, where does the global evidence land on teacher autonomy?

Rachel Glennerster: We don't have great evidence on exactly how much autonomy you should have. I would draw on my experience in TaRL Africa, which is really facing this problem every day of how much autonomy. The whole concept behind TaRL is you give tools to teachers, and they figure out which tool is best in their environment and in their school. You see people who are good at doing this, and it's brilliant.

They use the tool, but then the tools are designed so you can ask questions that are based on seeing what the child is getting right and what they're getting wrong, and so you probe them. All the tools in TaRL are designed to work that way, but then you see teachers who are not very confident on, say, place value, distinguishing between hundreds, tens units when you're doing math.

There's the wonderful tools using stones and sticks and chalk to help children understand that. When the teacher themselves is very unconfident about place value, they're not very good at asking the right questions that will prompt the learning. I do think that there are cases where you want to give them a little bit more structure, "Here are some questions that you can ask."

Ideally, obviously, we have the great teachers who don't need that script. It's not really scripting, but a little bit more structure. The other thing we see is that some teachers get stuck. They just keep doing the same exercises that they're familiar with again and again, and they don't progress. You need some nudging. Time to move on. You've done that a lot. Let's move on. I think it's not scripting, but it is nudging and making it easier to do the right kind of teaching.

David Evans: Done right. Structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level approaches, I believe, can be essentially an element of continuous professional development, where they help the teachers who are weaker to develop the pedagogical skills that we want them to have that are embodied in those programs, even while those teachers who are already flourishing and creative have the freedom to give outlet to that. Kwame, your book calls for an Afrocentric policy response, African voices, values, scholarship at the center of education agenda setting, and by extension, a template for the Global South more broadly. Concretely, what would that look like in practice for the global education community?

Kwame Akyeampong: I think we need to invite the voices of African scholars and teachers and listen to what they say and how they interpret the world in which they do their research. I've worked with researchers in Africa, in Ghana in particular. The conversations sometimes we have are not conversations I have with my Global North partners, because they bring a view of the world in which we are researching that I can identify with.

They see that view in a way in which often are not part of the discourse around how we address the problem. Their experiences are important. We need to bring them to co-construct the solutions and take seriously the African value system. This is an argument we make in the book that Africa has a very collective culture learning, and we need to be proud of that. The successful accelerated learning programs that we saw, particularly in Ethiopia, was very communal.

That was an element of it. That aspect of our value system should be part of how we design our classroom interaction. I think these are some of the things that we shouldn't shy away from. We should find ways in which we can actually bring our culture and our values and use them as leverage to really encourage stronger participation. I think that's what we mean by that Afrocentric policy response that we tend to look at policies that have worked in richer countries and adapt them a little bit.

We realize, I think it's important, those policies also have values associated with them. We say we need to elevate our African value system and make sure that they are represented in their classes. The way in which we design classrooms in itself should have an element of African value systems and culture. I think this is the key to how it will make children really embrace the kinds of innovations and interventions that we are talking about.

David Evans: One of the things that global researchers from outside of the continent can do is elevate those voices in the conversation, lend their platforms so that we hear more from African voices and African values. Rachel, if you could instantly change one education policy in the world, what do you think would do the most good? Easy question.

Rachel Glennerster: I would say change curricula so that they meet the needs of children. They're based around what they know already, and they respect what they know already, and what they need to know for their life, because that's not what curricula do at the moment. Too many of them are based around solving backwards from, "We need this child to pass an A-level at 18." An A-level, or the equivalent, was derived in London. It was, even in the UK, only ever designed for about 5% of the population. That was the point.

It was an entry exam to the top universities at a time when only 5% of the population in the UK was going to university. They've worked back from that to what you need to be doing as a six-year-old instead of saying, "This is what children already know. This is how we can utilize it. This is what they need to know," and developing curricula around that. I think that would make a huge difference, and recognize not just what they need to know, but recognize where they are and derive it from where children actually are.

David Evans: Excellent. Kwame, Rachel, thank you both. This was exactly the conversation I hoped it would be, where the global synthesis of evidence and the critique meet, and most importantly, what that means for the millions of children that systems have not reached yet or have not helped to thrive in the way that they could. For our listeners, Kwame's book, Reconceptualising the Learning Crisis in Africa, co-authored with Sean Higgins, is out now from Routledge. We'll link to that in the show notes.

You'll also find the 2023 Smart Buys Report and the new GEEAP-endorsed report on effective reading instruction, both of which came up in the conversation today. We'd like to thank Maleeha Hameed for her behind-the-scenes organizing of this episode, along with Stephanie Donohoe, Sally Zweimueller, Maya Verber, and the wider CGD communications team for producing this episode. Thank you for listening to The CGD Podcast, and we'll see you next time.