̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Global South

̽��ֱ��historian gathering fragments of the past to understand how humans tick

cg605 — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:19:43 +0000

After he began studying at Cambridge, Sujit Sivasundaram, found the freedom to let his imagination and curiosity roam. Yet his interests and intellectual life continue to be shaped by the global South. Today, as Professor of World History, he is passionate about bringing the untold and forgotten stories from the past to life, so that we can understand the conditions and possibilities that frame human existence.

School closures may have wiped out a year of academic progress for pupils in Global South, study warns

tdk25 — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 17:02:13 +0000

̽��ֱ��research, by academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and RTI International, attempts to quantify the scale of learning loss that children from poor and marginalised communities in the Global South may have experienced, and the extent to which home support and access to learning resources could ameliorate it.

While it is known that the education of these children has suffered disproportionately during the pandemic, it is much harder to measure exactly how much their academic progress has been impeded while schools have been closed.

̽��ֱ��researchers used data from Ghana to model the likely impact of closures for children in remote and deprived parts of that country. They found that on average, 66% of the learning gains made in foundational numeracy during the academic year are lost during three months out of school. ̽��ֱ��outcome is, however, far worse for children without adequate home learning resources or support.

̽��ֱ��authors suggest these findings provide a glimpse of a much wider pattern of learning loss that is being experienced by millions of disadvantaged children around the world.

Co-author Ricardo Sabates, from the REAL Centre in the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Education, said: “Despite teachers’ best efforts, we know school closures have held up, or reversed, the progress of millions of children. This study is one approach to estimate how much learning could have been lost, and how much worse this may have been for children from disadvantaged settings.”

“These figures represent an estimate of learning loss for children who spent 3 to 4 months out of school. We expect that as schools remained closed for longer, losses could be higher. We also acknowledge the important support that many families and communities provided with supplementary learning, which may have in turn limited the potential loss overall.”

̽��ֱ��study built on earlier research that highlighted the significant learning losses that occur when certain groups of children in developing countries move from one academic year to the next, particularly those who change language of instruction, and disadvantaged girls.

̽��ֱ��researchers used data charting the progress of more than 1,100 students on Ghana’s Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme between 2016 and 2018. This programme supports children aged eight to 14 who would not normally attend school, providing them with education in their own language and at flexible times. On completion, students are encouraged to enrol at a local government school, but the start of that school year occurs after a three-month gap, during which they receive no education.

̽��ֱ��researchers compared participants’ scores in foundational maths tests at four stages: when they started the CBE, when they finished, when they joined a government school, and after their first year in government school. They also accessed data about how much home learning support the students had – for example, whether they had books at home, or could seek help from an adult when struggling with homework.

During the CBE programme, the students’ test scores improved, on average, by 27 percentage points. When they were tested again after the three-month gap, however, their scores had reduced by an average of 18 percentage points. Two-thirds of the gains these students had made during the previous academic year were therefore lost while they were out of school. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that this is an upper estimate of the expected scale of loss during an equivalent period of school closures due to COVID-19. Fortunately, during the pandemic community efforts to enhance learning may have mitigated this effect for some children.

In spite of this, they also found that the basic learning loss was compounded among children who lacked support to study at home. For example:

Children without access to reading and learning resources at home (such as books) experienced a learning loss above 80%.
Children who said that they never asked adults in their household for help experienced a learning loss of around 85%.

Encouragingly, the study showed that in the first year of formal education, students not only recouped their learning loss, but improved, while the attainment gap between more and less advantaged students narrowed.

In many countries, however, it is becoming clear that many disadvantaged students – especially marginalised groups such as disabled children and many girls – are not returning to school. Therefore, the researchers suggest supporting access to diverse forms of education for students from less-advantaged backgrounds. There is evidence to show that community-based programmes, for example, can enhance a range of learning skills for these children. “Learning at home and in communities has to be reimagined if rapid gains are to be achieved as we continue to face the COVID-19 situation,” the authors say.

̽��ֱ��pattern of learning loss charted in Ghana may also apply far beyond the Global South. “This is an international challenge,” said co-author Emma Carter, also from the REAL Centre. “In Europe and the US, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds will similarly be experiencing severe learning loss. ̽��ֱ��levels of attainment may differ between countries, but it is highly likely that the pattern of loss remains.”

̽��ֱ��evaluation data used in the study was commissioned and funded by FCDO Ghana. ̽��ֱ��research is published in the International Journal of Educational Development.

As much as a year’s worth of past academic progress made by disadvantaged children in the Global South may have been wiped out by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have calculated.

Despite teachers’ best efforts, we know school closures have held up, or reversed, the progress of millions of children

Ricardo Sabates

Bill Wegener

School in Kampala, Uganda

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Surviving birth

lw355 — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:00:28 +0000

Researchers at one of the busiest maternity hospitals in the world aim to help more women survive complications giving birth.

Open-source toolkit helps developing countries meet demand for COVID-19 research and diagnostics

erh68 — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:22:13 +0000

High demand for millions of COVID-19 tests per day combined with a disrupted global supply chain has left many countries facing diagnostic shortages. In a recent Nature commentary, John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “the collapse of global cooperation [has] shoved Africa out of the diagnostics market....African countries have funds to pay for reagents but cannot buy them.”

Scientists across the world are therefore developing new tests that are faster, cheaper, adapted to needs of local health systems and easy to manufacture in order to overcome this challenge.

To enable scientists to access the research tools they need for their work, researchers from the Open Bioeconomy Lab at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the Lab de Tecnología Libre at iBio/PUC Chile and the FreeGenes Project at Stanford Universit y teamed up with synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks to design an open source toolkit that enables researchers to produce 16 of the most useful enzymes for a number of diagnostic techniques used to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

“Designing the collections was a great collaborative effort between researchers with diverse expertise and different local needs for fighting the pandemic,” said Dr Chiara Gandini from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. “We designed it with other biologists in mind, making it as easy as possible for them to reconfigure the toolkit for their requirements.”

̽��ֱ��‘Molecular Diagnostic Toolkit’ comprises ready-to-use DNA to produce enzymes including DNA polymerases and reverse transcriptases – the enzymes used in gold standard RT-qPCR tests. These enzymes are also useful for tests like LAMP, which is faster and simpler than RT-qPCR and is rapidly being adopted by more labs. Control DNA is also included in the toolkit to validate that tests will specifically detect SARS-CoV-2 but not closely related viruses.

̽��ֱ��Molecular Diagnostic Toolkit uses standard laboratory techniques to produce and purify the enzymes, but many researchers in the Global South work under challenging resource constraints and may need to adapt their work to the local availability of materials. They can therefore make use of the ‘E. coli Protein Expression Toolkit’: a collection of over 100 DNA parts that can be assembled in thousands of combinations to tailor the whole production process. For example, modules are included to bind enzymes to cellulose to develop paper-based tests or to activate enzyme production in cells using light from LEDs instead of expensive chemicals.

̽��ֱ��toolkit has been pre-ordered by over 34 labs from 16 countries, including Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Cameroon, Ethiopia, India and Vietnam.

“Having access to this palette of molecular tools is crucial for our region to fight any reagent supply shortages in the short-term, and to leverage technological autonomy in diagnostics and viral monitoring in the long term,” said Tamara Matute from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and iBio, who participated in the design of the collection. Matute’s colleague Isaac Núñez added that mechanisms like the open online community, Reclone Network, are also needed to enhance the usefulness of the collection through peer support including fostering “a collaborative community, crowd-sourced protocols and openly-shared resources.”

While the initial focus of the toolkit is to support research and development, the same DNA could be used to manufacture diagnostic kits with the correct processes and regulatory approvals in place. As it is open source, any company or institution is able to produce and commercialise enzymes from the toolkit. For example, LAMP enzymes will be manufactured at the Ethiopian Biotechnology Institute in a collaboration with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge supported by the Cambridge-Africa Alborada Fund.

Dr Brook Esseye of the EBTi LAMP Initiative said, “this initiative will enhance local capacity for bio-manufacturing and strengthen partnerships among researchers in various countries so we can join hands to fight this global pandemic.”

Looking beyond COVID-19, local bio-manufacturing capacity could underpin other advances in biotechnology research, education and innovation.

“A resilient local supply chain for diagnostics is vital to future health security and pandemic preparedness,” said Dr Jenny Molloy, Shuttleworth Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. “ ̽��ֱ��same enzymes used to detect COVID-19 can also detect malaria, typhoid and many other diseases. They can be applied in lots of other ways to make positive social and economic impact, including research to breed better crops, measuring the effect of conservation initiatives on biodiversity and tracking antibiotic resistance. This flexibility is why it is so important that key tools for biotechnology are accessible, used and useful for all researchers around the world.”

̽��ֱ��toolkit has been made freely available under the Open Material Transfer Agreement (OpenMTA), which gives explicit permission for recipients to distribute to other labs and to use the toolkit for commercial purposes, and can be ordered online via Stanford ̽��ֱ��’s Free Genes project.

Researchers and users of the toolkit are invited to share protocols, resources and advice via the Reclone Forum.

Researchers have developed a free, open-source toolkit that allows laboratories in developing countries to produce their own tools for COVID-19 research and diagnosis, without relying on an increasingly fractured global supply chain.

A resilient local supply chain for diagnostics is vital to future health security and pandemic preparedness

Jenny Molloy

NIAID

Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

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In Ethiopia, schools still lack basic means to contain COVID-19, as pupils return after months of interrupted learning

tdk25 — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 11:24:41 +0000

̽��ֱ��two new research and policy reports, compiled by academics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with partners in Ethiopia, draw attention to the combined educational and practical challenges facing the country’s schools as pupils return. ̽��ֱ��authors suggest that these converging problems, while more severe than those affecting schools in wealthy countries such as the UK, are typical of those confronting millions of parents and teachers across sub-Saharan Africa as the pandemic continues to exact a far less-visible toll on their lives and communities.

̽��ֱ��findings are based on telephone interviews with more than 900 teachers and caregivers which were carried out in August. Schools in Ethiopia are currently reopening on a staggered basis for the first time since March, with priority given to schools in rural areas. Since the study was completed, many of the issues it documents will have been compounded by the crisis in Tigray.

Overall, the researchers found that, despite significant efforts by the Ethiopian government to support remote learning, many pupils are likely to have had little or no education during the closure period. Disadvantaged groups – such as poorer children, those in remote areas, and girls – are likely to need specific attention having missed out the most.

But while it is therefore vital that schools reopen, the reports also highlight the huge challenges of making schools COVID-safe at a time when access to a vaccine is still, in all likelihood, months away for many teachers and pupils. They point to cases where schools lack soap and running water, for example, and to concerns about the practicalities of social-distancing in overcrowded classrooms.

̽��ֱ��surveys were undertaken by members of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in partnership with colleagues at Addis Ababa ̽��ֱ�� and the Ethiopian Policy Studies Institute, as part of the RISE Ethiopia and Early Learning Partnership projects.

School closures are widely understood to have deepened a long-term ‘learning crisis’ in low- and middle-income countries in which many of the least-advantaged children already struggle to attain basic levels of literacy and numeracy. Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the REAL Centre, said: “These reports describe the situation in Ethiopia, but highlight interlocking problems that apply much more widely.”

“In many parts of the world, COVID-19 has not just made it harder to keep children learning: it also makes it harder to keep them in school. There are multiple constraints affecting low- and middle-income countries which mean that the very poorest and most marginalised children are even greater risk of dropping out of the system altogether than they already were.”

Professor Tassew Woldehanna, President at Addis Ababa ̽��ֱ��, said: “With schools reopening it is essential that policy-makers have access to the sort of clear, robust evidence presented here. It is critical to targeting those pupils who need the most support, and limiting the effects of lost learning for millions of children.”

̽��ֱ��team interviewed 443 primary school teachers and principals and 480 parents and caregivers. They also co-ordinated with surveys by the Oxford-based Young Lives programme, who spoke to a further 64 principals.

Their results show that while many teachers have been quick to adapt to remote teaching and learning, students’ access to education has clearly been uneven. In some rural regions, for example, none of the teachers interviewed had internet access and only around half of households had electricity. ̽��ֱ��researchers estimate that around two-thirds of the teachers they surveyed had reached fewer than half of their students during the closures.

̽��ֱ��uneven provision that this implies is likely to have affected disadvantaged groups, such as poorer children, those in rural areas, and girls (whose education is often considered lower-priority than that of boys), most severely. Many teachers fear that, because these groups’ parents often have low literacy, low regard for education, and recruit their children to support the generation of family income; such children are especially at risk of dropping out of school, or of never returning.

̽��ֱ��research also draws attention to COVID-19’s impact on pre-primary education in Ethiopia: a sector which has been neglected by many governments during the pandemic. Only 53% of parents or caregivers with young children had been able to engage in learning activities with pre-primary children during school closures. Just 10% reported any contact with pre-primary teachers.

At the same time, however, the reports highlight significant infrastructure and resource challenges within schools themselves. 38% of parents said that their children’s schools were only ‘somewhat equipped’ with handwashing facilities; 22% said that they were ‘not equipped at all’. About 15% said that they did not have facemasks for their children to wear at school, and 46% could not provide their children with hand sanitiser. A majority of teachers and principals, especially those in rural areas, expressed similar concerns about both hygiene, and a lack of adequate classroom space to maintain social distancing.

̽��ֱ��researchers stress that despite the efforts made by the government so far, ongoing interventions will therefore be needed to help all children benefit as schools reopen. Their main recommendations are:

A targeted, national campaign by government, school management committees and local authorities to keep children in school.
Extra support (and, if viable, time in school) for students who need to recover lost learning.
̽��ֱ��construction of new classrooms or sheltered areas where possible, as well as the targeted supply of extra hygiene resources such as sanitisers, facemasks and handwashing facilities to those most in need.
Additional investment in resources and strategies to support remote learning, particularly in the context of further possible outbreaks in schools before the effective delivery of a vaccine.

Both reports are available from the REAL Centre website.

Many schools in Ethiopia lack the hygiene facilities and infrastructure to control COVID-19 effectively, as they reopen for the first time after months of disrupted learning, new research indicates.

COVID-19 has not just made it harder to keep children learning: it also makes it harder to keep them in school

Pauline Rose

UNICEF Ethiopia

An empty classroom in Haro Huba school, in Oromia region, central Ethiopia.

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Scientists identify warning signs over effectiveness of HIV ‘wonder drug’ in sub-Saharan Africa

cjb250 — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

As HIV copies itself and replicates, it can develop errors, or ‘mutations’, in its genetic code (its RNA). While a drug may initially be able to suppress or even kill the virus, certain mutations can allow the virus to develop resistance to its effects. If a mutated strain begins to spread within a population, it can mean once-effective drugs are no longer able to treat people.

HIV treatment usually consists of a cocktail of drugs that includes a type of drug known as a non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI). However, in recent years, HIV has begun to develop resistance to NNRTIs. Between 10% and 15% of patients in much of sub-Saharan Africa are infected by a strain of HIV resistant to these drugs. If a patient is infected with an NNRTI-resistant strain, they are at a two- to three-fold increased risk of the drug regimen failing.

In 2019, the World Health Organization began to recommend dolutegravir as the preferred first-line treatment for HIV in most populations. Dolutegravir was dubbed a ‘wonder drug’ because it was safe, potent and cost-effective and scientists had seen no drug resistance against it in clinical trials. However, there is little data on the success of dolutegravir against circulating strains of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers from South Africa, the UK and the USA examined the genetic code of HIV to determine if drug resistance mutations in 874 volunteers living with HIV affected their treatment success. ̽��ֱ��individuals were enrolled in a clinical trial for people initiating HIV treatment to compare two drug regimens: efavirenz, an NNRTI and prior first-line therapy in the region, and dolutegravir.

̽��ֱ��goal of this study was to determine whether drug resistance to efavirenz prior to starting treatment affected treatment success (suppression of the virus in the blood) over the first two years of therapy with both of these two regimens.

As expected, the presence of drug resistance substantially reduced the chances of treatment success in people taking efavirenz, successfully suppressing the virus over 96 weeks in 65% of participants, compared to 85% of non-resistant individuals. However, unexpectedly, the same pattern was true for individuals taking dolutegravir-based treatments: 66% of those with efavirenz resistance mutations remained suppressed over 96 weeks, compared to 84% of those without the mutations. These relationships held true after accounting for other factors, such as treatment adherence.

“We fully expected efavirenz to be less effective among patients HIV strains resistant to NNRTIs,” said Dr Mark Siedner, faculty member at the Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “What took us completely by surprise was that dolutegravir – a different class of drug which is generally effective in the face of drug resistance – would also be less effective in people with these resistant strains.

“We are working now to tease out if this was due to the virus or the participants – for instance, if people with resistance are less likely to take their pills regularly. Either way, if this pattern holds true, it could have far reaching impacts on our predictions of long-term treatment control for millions of people taking dolutegravir in the region.”

Professor Ravi Gupta from the Department of Medicine at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge said: “This a huge concern. Dolutegravir was very much seen as a ‘wonder drug’, but our study suggests it might not be as effective in a significant number of patients who are resistant to another important class of antiretroviral drugs.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say it is not clear why efavirenz-resistant mutations should affect susceptibility of dolutegravir, though one hypothesis is that integrase inhibitors such as dolutegravir push the virus to replicate and mutate faster, in turn developing resistance to the new drug in an evolutionary arms race. Alternatively, it could be due to poor adherence to treatment regimens, even though the analysis accounted for adherence by two independent methods. Further research is needed to find out why.

Professor Gupta added: “What this shows is that we urgently need to prioritise point of care tests to identify people with drug resistance HIV, particularly against efavirenz, and to more closely and accurately monitor treatment adherence. ̽��ֱ��development of such tests is at an advanced stage, but there a lack of investment from funders and philanthropic donors. We urgently need agencies and individuals to step forward and help support these programmes.

“In addition, we need to provide widespread access to viral load monitoring so that we can find those who are struggling, get them on more appropriate regimens, and limit the emergence of resistance when patients are failing therapy.”

̽��ֱ��study was carried out by researchers at: the Africa Health Research Institute, ̽��ֱ�� of KwaZulu-Natal, ̽��ֱ�� of Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, and the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), in South Africa; the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Liverpool, and Imperial College London in the UK; and Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA.

̽��ֱ��research was supported by USAID, Unitaid, the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), with investigational drug donated by ViiV Healthcare and Gilead Sciences, and by Wellcome and the National Institutes of Health.

Reference
Siedner, MJ et al. Reduced efficacy of HIV-1 integrase inhibitors in patients with drug resistance mutations in reverse transcriptase. Nat Comms; 1 Dec 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19801-x

Dolutegravir, the current first-line treatment for HIV, may not be as effective as hoped in sub-Saharan Africa, suggests new research published on World AIDS Day. ̽��ֱ��study finds that this so-called ‘wonder drug’ may be less effective in patients resistant to older drugs.

Dolutegravir was very much seen as a ‘wonder drug’, but our study suggests it might not be as effective in a significant number of patients who are resistant to another important class of antiretroviral drugs

Ravi Gupta

Jon Rawlinson

Know your HIV status sign in Africa

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‘Spill-over’ effects show hidden value of prioritising education of poorest children and marginalised girls

tdk25 — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 10:11:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��newly-reported study, by academics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, is one of the first to measure the complete value that interventions targeting poor and marginalised children also have for many of their peers, principally through ‘spill-over’ effects which improve the wider education system.

̽��ֱ��team tested their model by analysing a programme by CAMFED (the Campaign for Female Education) in Tanzania, which supports the education of disadvantaged girls. They took into account its impact not just on those girls, but on other children at schools where their programme operates. Strikingly, for every $100 spent per girl, per year, the programme resulted in learning gains equivalent to an additional two years of education for all girls and boys at those schools.

̽��ֱ��study was carried out by members of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Professor Ricardo Sabates, the co-lead researcher, said: “Helping the most marginalised children inevitably costs more, and most cost-effectiveness measures only consider that expense against the impact on those specific pupils. But programmes like CAMFED’s also have spill-over benefits and critically are keeping girls in school who would otherwise have dropped out. We can, and should, factor in those considerations when assessing cost-effectiveness.”

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the REAL Centre, added: “While it may cost more to reach the most marginalised pupils, the impact of those efforts is far more impressive than we tend to imagine. This research explains why system reforms should focus on those who need the most support. Education systems that function for the most marginalised children function for everyone.”

CAMFED is a non-governmental organisation which improves the education of marginalised girls in Africa and was recently awarded the 2020 Yidan Prize for Education Development. In Tanzania, its bursaries enable thousands of girls to attend secondary school, in tandem with interventions aimed at improving participation and learning among all children in partner schools.

Because most cost-effectiveness analyses only measure the impact of a programme on its direct beneficiaries (in this case marginalised girls), interventions such as CAMFED’s often seem to have limited reach while at the same time appearing more expensive than those targeting a broader demographic. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge study examined how best to measure the wider impact of CAMFED’s work in Tanzania, and then used this to refine the cost-effectiveness analysis.

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed data from CAMFED’s programme over two years. To calculate per-head costs, they distinguished between the different components of the intervention and their assorted beneficiaries. For example, the cost of bursaries was divided by the number of marginalised girls who received them, but the cost of delivering extra-curricular courses in CAMFED-supported schools was divided by the number of all participating students. This provided a basis for identifying average annual unit costs for individual categories of beneficiaries.

Impact was calculated by comparing the English test scores of children from 81 randomly-selected CAMFED-supported schools with children from 60 control schools that received no support. Scores were collected at the start and end of the two years, and the team used data about the children’s socio-economic background to make direct comparisons between pupils from similar settings.

They also compared the dropout rates at both groups of schools, and used this to weight the final cost-effectiveness analysis. This reflected the fact that CAMFED’s programme not only improves learning, but also supports girls who might otherwise have dropped out of school, or never attended at all.

̽��ֱ��cost of the programme, when only the most marginalised girls targeted by the bursaries were considered, was apparently steep: at $130.41 per year for each girl receiving financial support. However, the researchers also found that the per-head cost for other boys and girls at the same schools was just $15.40, demonstrating far greater value for money overall. ̽��ֱ��additional cost of the bursaries was also found to be vital for enabling the most disadvantaged girls to stay in school.

Pupils attending CAMFED-supported schools made significant academic improvements compared with their peers. ̽��ֱ��improvement in English test scores among girls receiving financial support was about 35% better than comparable girls in the control group. But other girls also performed similarly, while the boys did about 25% better. Girls who received financial support were 25% less likely to drop out of school than those in the control group.

̽��ֱ��researchers then calculated the learning gains of pupils on the CAMFED programme per unit cost. When this measure was converted into equivalent years of learning, they found that for every $100 spent on each of the marginalised girls targeted, English learning outcomes improved by the equivalent of an extra 1.45 years of schooling for all pupils. When the increased proportion of marginalised girls remaining in school was factored in, the improvement in both access and learning for all girls and boys across the CAMFED schools was actually equivalent to an additional two years of schooling per $100.

While it is difficult to compare these results with other programmes, the study suggests that the cost-effectiveness of CAMFED’s work in Tanzania is at least commensurate with similar interventions in sub-Saharan Africa that do not target marginalised groups. But the findings may also be conservative. For example, CAMFED’s programme may also have further benefits outside the school system, for example among the siblings and communities of the young women it supports.

“Even though we probably underestimated its impact, this intervention is still extremely cost-effective,” Sabates added. “It shows real improvements in learning are best enabled when we invest in the children at greatest risk of being left behind.”

̽��ֱ��research is published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness.

Development projects that target the education of the world’s very poorest girls also significantly improve other young people’s attainment, according to new research that suggests such initiatives should become a priority for international aid.

Real improvements in learning are best enabled when we invest in the children at greatest risk of being left behind

Ricardo Sabates

CAMFED/Eliza Powell

Sophia (right), a CAMFED Learner Guide, with secondary student Hanipha, who she supports at school in Morogoro, Tanzania

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Enterprising researchers: Making a difference in Southern Africa

skbf2 — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:50:18 +0000

An award-winning team from Cambridge, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia has been bolstering entrepreneurship in Southern Africa and supporting some exciting new ventures along the way.