Improving Enrolment and Learning Through Videos and Mobiles: Experimental Evidence from Northern Nigeria

Abstract for a Comm Talk from the 2022 International SBCC Summit in Morocco: 

"The intervention targeted 6-9-year-old children and their parents. While the first intervention consisted of community screenings of the edutainment production "My Better World", produced by Impact(Ed) and designed to increase parental aspirations, improve self-efficacy beliefs, and reshape attitudes towards girl education; the second intervention was an add-on in half of treated communities that consisted in the provision of smartphones preloaded with two EdTech apps to a third of screening attendees: Feed The Monster, a gamified app that teaches reading foundations; and the Global Digital Library, which includes hundreds of early grade reading books in the local language. Both apps are open source and were developed as part of multi-donor collaborations. Together, both apps have been translated in over 100 languages.The study is a cluster randomized control trial in 128 school catchment areas (sca), where 32 sca were only exposed to the community screenings (Treatment 1); 32 sca were exposed to both the community screenings and the EdTech add-on (Treatment 2) and 64 sca were assigned to the control group. The data collection consisted of a baseline and an average of a one-year follow up for 9,300 children and their parents. To study within-household spillovers, researchers also collected information and test scores for older siblings. In late-2022, researchers are collecting a 4-year follow up survey to assess long-term impacts of this 5-day intervention."