Khulisa is assisting USAID Southern Africa with planning, designing, monitoring, evaluating and learning from interventions focused on improving the reading skills of primary grade learners, as part of the PERFORMANCE project.

Under the contract, we conducted a Design and Implementation Evaluation of the Reading Support Project (RSP). Comprising 263 schools and over 1500 teachers, the RSP focusses on improving the reading teaching practices of Grade 1 to 3 teachers in Setswana and English in two districts in the North West Province of South Africa, with the ultimate outcome to improve learners’ reading skills.  

The first step was to evaluate the feasibility of the RSP reaching its intended outcomes by looking at the program design. A key lesson from this design evaluation is that through developing process maps for this intervention, we (the evaluators) were able to identify potential barriers, challenges, and pathways to enable the achievement of the outcomes.  It led to a number of recommendations for strengthening the design of the RSP. The report is available here.