Nationwide rollout of a targeted teaching approach in
Côte d'Ivoire

With half of primary school pupils in Côte d'Ivoire facing barriers to learning, the country has committed to improving its education system. The Ministry of National Education and Literacy (MENA) has made the development and consolidation of foundational skills a national priority, leading to the design and implementation of the National Strategy for the Improvement of Early School Learning in 2024.

This program is aimed at primary school students and is based on two key pillars:

• Structured teaching, aimed at ensuring the rigorous implementation of a program to establish fundamental reading and mathematics skills in the first grade.
• A remedial approach, inspired by TaRL (Teaching at the Right Level), and originally called the PEC - to address learning gaps in reading and mathematics from second to fifth grade.

The remedial approach, developed by the NGO Pratham in India and implemented in several African countries by TaRL Africa, focuses on identifying each child's individual learning needs and adapting teaching accordingly.

In addition to their regular school hours, students from second to fifth grade spend one and a half hours in learning support classes where they are grouped according to their current knowledge levels. Teachers use these targeted support sessions to help students improve their reading and math skills. Several research studies in India, Morocco, Madagascar, and Zambia have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, with a two- to three-fold improvement in foundational reading and mathematics skills in less than 100 days.

For the past five years, TaRL Africa has been supporting MENA to adapt and implement this approach, which was initially trialed in the southern regions and then more recently in the north of the country. FID financing was granted to deploy this program in the region's multiple languages.

The project's expansion to the north of the country offered the chance to test the conditions for implementation in areas underserved by traditional partners of the sector, while providing training for educators.

The Ivorian government is currently preparing to expand the National Strategy for the Improvement of Early School Learning to second grade pupils in more than 13,000 new public schools from September 2025.

FID is delighted to have played a part in this nationwide approach by financing the project in the north of the country. This support has helped define the requirements and demonstrate the feasibility of the project's scale up, led by TaRL Africa, with the aim of supporting the most underserved regions.