Supporting teachers for better student outcomes in Rwanda

Over the past twenty years, Rwanda has significantly expanded access to primary education. The primary school completion rate now exceeds 80%, reflecting the government’s substantial investments in education (World Bank, 2024).

This achievement comes with a major challenge: ensuring that all students actually learn. National assessments show that a significant share of students do not master the foundational reading and mathematics skills expected by the end of primary school. Learning gaps are particularly large in low-income school districts, with consequences extending far beyond the classroom, as these gaps account for 20–50% of income differences across countries (Angrist et al., 2021). This widely documented “learning crisis” has now become one of the main priorities of Rwanda’s education policy.

At the same time, the education system faces significant teacher turnover: around one in five teachers leaves the profession every year (Zeitlin, 2020; World Bank, 2024). This makes it essential to develop mechanisms that can strengthen teacher motivation, improve teaching practices and better track student progress.

Rwanda has had a performance-based contract system for public employees, including teachers, since 2006. However, these contracts rely on criteria that are not sufficiently objective and do not effectively reward teachers’ efforts.

A growing body of evidence suggests that performance contracts can improve student learning outcomes in a range of countries, including India, Israel, Tanzania and Uganda. In Rwanda, an earlier randomized evaluation conducted by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Rwanda Education Board (Leaver et al., 2021) showed at small scale that a contract based on teacher attendance, lesson preparation and teaching practices could significantly improve student learning, with gains equivalent to nearly one additional year of learning (Crawfurd, 2021).

The STARS project builds on these initial results and aims to strengthen Rwanda’s national performance contract system (imihigo). Over three years, it rigorously tested several contract variations, including measures of student learning progress alongside existing criteria, in order to identify the most effective combination for improving teaching practices and student learning. The project also strengthened CAMIS, the national assessment management system, to improve the quality of the data used to measure student learning and manage performance contracts.

FID is supporting this process over the long term: after funding the three-year testing of different contract models and the strengthening of the data infrastructure, it is now supporting the national scale-up of the selected model.

Current funding phase and scale-up

The results of the first phase have led the Rwandan government to launch a new stage of the programme. The best-performing contract model, which combines incentives for teachers and school head teachers, is now being progressively rolled out nationwide while continuing to be evaluated.

Supported by FID, this new phase is extending the model to approximately 3,500 primary and lower-secondary schools, 88,000 teachers and 3.2 million students, while continuing evaluations to optimize implementation and cost-effectiveness.

Research team

• Dr. Andrew Zeitlin is an Associate Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research focuses on teacher accountability in East Africa, and he previously served as the IGC Rwanda Lead Academic.
• Dr. Clare Leaver is an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Fellow of University College, Oxford. She is an applied theorist specializing in public-sector contracting.
• Dr. Owen Ozier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. His research examines human development in East Africa, with a particular focus on the measurement and determinants of learning. He is also a member of J-PAL.
• Dr. Pieter Serneels is a Professor of Economics at the University of East Anglia. His work applies behavioral economics to human resources, including research on the intrinsic motivation of health workers in Rwanda.