Children’s development is significantly attributed to their experiences at home, from birth through the early years of schooling, and responsive caregiving from early on has a significant impact on later learning outcomes. Interventions aimed at increasing parental engagement in children’s early learning can be expensive, however, and there is limited evidence as to what works best for parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries. This report presents the findings from a parent engagement pilot intervention conducted by the Tayari program in three counties in Kenya that tested two methods of providing parents with home-based responsive play activities to promote children’s holistic development.

Under the Tusome-Nakuru County Youth Bunge Forum (NCYBF), the program sought to engage the youth in improving early literacy skills among Grades 1-3 children in Nakuru County in Kenya. The Nakuru County Youth Bunge Forum (NCYBF) signed a memorandum of agreement with the local public library, the Kenya National Library Services (KNLS), Nakuru Branch to provide enhanced literacy activities. This CIES 2019 presentation will share the outcomes of the partnership, the effect on children’s literacy skills and the long term benefits to the program implementation and its sustainability.

The Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity is USAID’s flagship education program in Kenya. This CIES 2019 presentation shares the findings from research currently in progress to analyze Tusome’s 2017 lesson observation data, and shares lessons learned from: designing a coaching program to operate at scale; effectively combining incentives and sanctions to drive coaching activities; and effectively combining automated, moderately high-tech data pipelines with qualitative, low-tech feedback on coaching of coaches.

At CIES 2019, Dr. Benjamin Piper reflected on the use of experimental and implementation research to inform the scale-up and success of the USAID Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity in Kenya.

This presentation shares findings from a longitudinal study of the Kenya Tayari program, examining whether ECD effects persisted into primary school, presented by Dr. Benjamin Piper at CIES 2019.

Findings on the impact of the Tusome intervention and language of instruction on refugee learners in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, presented by Dr. Benjamin Piper at CIES 2019.

Dr. Benjamin Piper and Dr. Yasmin Sitabkhan presented findings at CIES 2019 on gender and math in the preschool years from the Kenya Tayari program.

The Tayari Program – Getting Children Ready for School is a Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) funded early education program in Kenya with a goal to increase school readiness skills of pre-primary children in Kenya, including sufficient cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being. As of 2018, Tayari has reached 145,000 children 1,500 early childhood centers in four selected counties in Kenya. Tayari’s activities include development of learning materials for students and teachers, teacher training and instructional support, and integrated technology solutions for tracking child development outcomes. Additionally, one component aims to reduce illness-related school absenteeism by promoting improved hygiene practices, water treatment, and health record-keeping in schools. To better understand parental involvement and the feasibility and cost of scaling up a parental component within the project, the Tayari program tested two different approaches to engaging parents in play-based activities at home to promote their child’s learning and development, with an aim to see which modality was more effective in getting parents to engage in their children’s learning and development at home. Reaching over 1200 pre-primary families in 3 counties, Treatment Group 1 parents received weekly face to face meetings, with a new activity introduced each week (for a total of four weeks). Treatment Group 2 parents, received the same activities, but instead of meeting face to face, the activity sheets and materials were sent home with their child from school. The four selected activities are the same for both Treatment Groups, and include a memory card game, a counting game, a read aloud, and a letter recognition game. The content of the four activities was designed to align with the Tayari curricular content. All materials were designed to be low cost and illustrated locally. Data and feedback on the pilot was collected through weekly SMS messages sent to the mobile phones of the represented parent in both treatment groups. We used the program, “Gooseberry” to request response from parents regarding each activity, including attendance to the meeting (for treatment group 1) and whether they received the materials (for treatment group 2), how often parents played the game with their children over the course of the week, and their level of satisfaction or enjoyment with the activity. Both treatment groups also participated in a conclusion workshop, at the end of the pilot, to receive qualitative feedback from parents via small group focus groups and interviews.

Given the dearth of research on early numeracy interventions in low- and middle-income countries, this paper presents the instructional methodology and impact results of the Tayari program. Tayari is a preprimary intervention in Kenya (2014–2019) that prepares children aged four and five for entry into primary school by providing materials for students, training for teachers, and continuous in-classroom support. The Tayari methodology was built on the Kenyan government’s preprimary syllabus to produce instruction that was developmentally sequenced, linked to out-of-school experiences, and supportive of children’s number sense. Tayari was evaluated using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) and collection of longitudinal data from 2,957 children in treatment and control schools at three time points. Pupil assessment items were drawn from a growing body of research on preprimary numeracy in developing contexts, plus instruments and techniques from the Measuring Early Learning and Quality Outcomes (MELQO) program (UNESCO, UNICEF, Brookings Institution, & World Bank Group, 2017). The impact evaluation of the longitudinal RCT results showed statistically significant effects in the numeracy tasks of producing sets, identifying numbers, and naming shapes, while revealing no initial effects in the areas of oral and mental addition. We present recommendations for Tayari’s improvement in terms of mathematics instruction, as well as preprimary policy implications for Kenya and similar contexts.