OUR IMPACT

The Centre for Global Development and researchers from UC San Diego team evaluated the first three years of Liberia’s flagship education partnership “LEAP.” Rising was highlighted as a service provider for delivering “a consistently positive pattern of results across learning, access, and safety dimensions.” The report also found that students in Rising schools progressed more than twice as fast as children in comparable government control schools. Since the endline report was published the LEAP partnership program has gone on to further successes. Today Rising partners with 95 government schools in the program. More information can be found on the learnings from the LEAP program here.

RISING BLOG SUMMARY

Dr. David Johnson and PT Jenny Hsieh of Oxford University conducted a three-year study from 2017 to 2019, focusing on Rising’s Private Schools in Sierra Leone. The research compared the learning gains of students in these schools with those in other comparable private and government schools. They found that students in Rising’s schools made between 48% and 160% more progress. Girls in Rising schools advanced more rapidly than boys, and 2 to 4 times faster than girls in the comparison schools.

RISING BLOG SUMMARY

IDinsight conducted an impact evaluation of Rising’s "FasterReading" program in Liberia during its first year of implementation after the program was designed, developed and tested. The study focused on overage ECE students and found that  children who enrolled in FasterReading had a 36% improvement in their foundational reading skills (equivalent to 0.28 SD), over and above teaching as usual. They were also 11% more likely to attend school.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and J-PAL have conducted an early evaluation of our virtual math tutor “Rori”, showing very promising early results. The evaluation, conducted over 8 months, included 1,000 students in grades 3-9 across 11 schools in Ghana. The study found that students who received two 30-minute sessions with Rori, on top of their normal math lessons, had “markedly higher scores” in maths, with an effect size of 0.36 SD. Research on Rori is continuing and preparations are being made for a larger RCT study to take place in Academic Year 2025/26.

RISING BLOG SUMMARY

The Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge is an education outcomes partnership designed by Education Outcomes Fund in partnership with the Ministry of Education of Sierra Leone. It is designed to increase literacy and numeracy outcomes over three years for 134,000 children across the country. Rising is one of five non-state actors to participate in the program. As part of the program, Rising implements its full education model in 66 schools in Tonkolili and Kono Districts. Schools are provided with teacher guides and students workbooks, covering the full Sierra Leonean English and Math curriculum; our foundational literacy and numeracy programs (Rising Faster), as well as teacher and school leader training and regular support in the form of weekly visits from our Rising Coaches. Year 2 Results in the program will be published here in November 2024. 

Rising was selected by the Ministry of Education Ghana as a provider to support 170 public schools as part of the groundbreaking “GEOP” partnership. The objective of GEOP is to “strengthen support for schools and out-of-School-Children (OOSC). GEOP is a multi-year program that will have a rigorous randomised control trial evaluation attached. At this stage no public results have been shared, but we will post our results here as soon as they are made public.

Rising Academies explored the impact of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) content delivered to students and teachers in Ghana in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic upon school reopening. The study sought to evaluate the impact of the Rising on Air audio content on students, with a focus on foundational numeracy skills for students and instruction of foundational literacy skills for teachers, and published in the EdTech Hub Evidence Library.

The Center for Global Development partnered with Rising Academies to implement a randomised control trial during the COVID-19 pandemic in which, in addition to the government educational radio broadcast, students received SMS reminders to listen to the broadcast or SMS reminders plus one-on-one live phone sessions with school teachers. Rising Academies teachers displayed higher implementation fidelity, with students receiving an average 10 out of a maximum of 16 calls per subject, compared to an average of 7 calls per subject from public school teachers.