Rising shines as the leading provider in latest SLEIC Partnership Evaluation

We’re thrilled to see the positive results from the second year of the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge, (SLEIC) announced by the Education Outcomes Fund last week.

Under the visionary leadership of Chief Minister David Sengeh and the Minister for Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Conrad Sackey, SLEIC was founded as a partnership between the Sierra Leone government and the Education Outcomes Fund to transform primary learning in the country. This ground-breaking initiative was launched in 2022 with an ambitious goal to boost learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy over a three year period.

SLEIC’s approach combines teacher training, community support, and innovative financing to ensure long-lasting change. The implementing partners, of which Rising is one, combine global best practice with local solutions that adapt to the needs of different communities.

Rising is proud to work alongside  EducAid Sierra Leone, Save the Children, Street Child, and the National Youth Awareness Forum in collaboration with Kizazi to reach over 134,000 children in 325 primary schools across Sierra Leone.

In Year 2 the program saw  96,171 children enrolled, 1,849 teachers trained, and 13,147 community members engaged and most importantly, the results show significant  learning outcomes*.

We’re particularly thrilled that students in Rising partnership schools achieved even greater gains than the program average. In Math, students in Rising schools improved by 0.36 standard deviations compared with 0.29 at the program-level. In English, even greater relative gains were achieved with Rising students improving by 0.33 standard deviations compared with 0.18 across the program. 

It’s also incredibly exciting to see the gender gap being closed. Girls made remarkable progress with a 124% increase in numeracy outcomes and in some regions have caught up with boys. Girls continue to score lower overall than boys but the gap has narrowed in the treatment schools, decreasing from a 15 point difference in Year 1 to a 4 point difference on average in Year 2. 

Our CEO, Stephanie Dobrowolski outlines why we’re so encouraged by these results:

“The SLEIC results represent significant gains in learning in a context where, sadly, outcomes still lag far behind. National learning assessments for P4 students in Sierra Leone recently drove this point home. According to the report, “almost all pupils do not, without support, have a foundation for future success: English (95%) and Math (98%)”. The P4 results are sobering. They’re also exactly why we should be paying attention to the progress in learning that is taking place within the SLEIC program and creating opportunities to take these learnings forward.

These results represent genuinely collaborative efforts across multiple partners within the program.

🤝 Through the convening leadership of the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and The Education Outcomes Fund, the service providers bring a spirit of mutual respect and learning, and share strategies to help each other improve.

📈 Rising has partnered with Bridges Outcomes Partnerships, and with their extensive experience with outcomes-based programs, they have challenged us to really leverage our data and insights to target our intervention efforts more effectively.

🙏 Our team is continuously working with and through our local government partners, who play an essential role in coordinating and overseeing all of the education efforts in their districts.

🏫 And of course there’s the collaboration with our school communities. Together, we work hard to ensure students are in school, teachers are supported and the learning environment is safe.

These results represent the resilience of our Rising Academy Network SLEIC team and their ability to enable change. We’re so grateful for all of their hard work!

Ultimately, these results represent our opportunity to strive for more because at Rising however well we do, we always drive to do better. We know these are not yet the final program results. We also know they are the starting point for the longer-term ambition - to see all students, in every school, learning the foundations for future success.”

We want to extend an enormous thank you to all of our partners and look forward to achieving even more growth in Year 3! 

Read the full report from the Education Outcomes Fund here: https://www.educationoutcomesfund.org/post/year-2-results-a-leap-forward-for-learning-in-sierra-leone 

*The programme is independently evaluated by Oxford Policy Management via a rigorous randomised control trial that compares results in the SLEIC treatment schools with an equal number of control schools that did not receive the SLEIC intervention.