This article in The Economist cites RTI researcher Benjamin Piper, and an article he co-authored with RTI colleague Timothy Slade on summer learning loss in Malawi. "Benjamin Piper, of RTI International, an American research institute, suspects that the scale of summer learning loss may be worse in the developing world, where it has largely gone unnoticed and unstudied. In rural areas in particular, reading material can be hard to come by and some children still spend their holidays helping their families in the fields. A study Mr Piper co-authored in 2017, on Malawian children taking part in an American-funded literacy programme, may be the only one on summer learning loss in sub-Saharan Africa. It found that the loss was almost as big as the gains the literacy programme generated during the school year. Mr Piper says that international donors, who spent $1.4bn on basic education aid in Africa in 2015, risk “losing what they invested”."