Malawi Reading Intervention: EGRA Impact Evaluation Report

In 2010, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in collaboration with the Malawi Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST), developed a project to improve primary education and implementation of the National Primary Curriculum. The Malawi Teacher Professional Development Support (MTPDS) project, as it is known, included five major results areas related to improving teaching policy, teacher performance, early grade literacy, primary teaching and learning materials, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. While many of the inputs designed to support these objectives took place on a national scale, a specific reading improvement program was designed and delivered in two districts in order to determine its effectiveness on a small scale. This report describes the impact of the intervention, evaluated based on a rigorous three-year randomized control trial (RCT) design.