Daily Magazine

By 2019, the World Bank’s PRIEDE project had exceeded several of its goals. Aiming to improve Kenyan students’ base math skills, it had distributed over 3 million textbooks, appraised nearly 30,000 teachers, and its national student information system had registered 96 percent of all students nationwide.

But in 2020, the program requested $9 million more to rollout a teacher training campaign. Halfway through, it had recorded a 2.5 percent decline in the grade 2 math skills it was trying to improve, having omitted to train educators on how to use the new resources effectively. The decline was eventually recovered but the project ultimately concluded that distributing materials had almost no positive effect on learning outcomes.