USAID Southern Africa contracted Khulisa to assist with planning, designing, monitoring, evaluating and learning from interventions focused on improving the reading skills of primary grade learners as part of the Practical Education Research for Optimal Reading and Management: Analyze, Collaborate, Evaluate (PERFORMANCE) activity.
Under this contract, Khulisa conducted the Design and Implementation Evaluation of the Foundation for Professional Development (FPD) run Reading Support Project (RSP). Comprising 263 schools and over 1500 teachers, the RSP is focused on improving the reading teaching practices of Grade 1 to 3 teachers in Setswana and English First Additional Language (EFAL) in two districts in the North West Province of South Africa, with the ultimate outcome to improve learners’ reading skills.

The first step in the evaluation was to assesses the feasibility of the RSP reaching its intended outcomes by looking at the program design, through a design evaluation. 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.

Khulisa conducted the implementation evaluation of the RSP, guided by findings from the design evaluation. Activities for this part of the evaluation included a review of RSP monitoring data and Data Quality Assessment (DQA), a fidelity review, a cost and time analysis, coaching case studies, and interviews and surveys with coaches, teachers, principals, School Management Team (SMT) members, district and provincial stakeholders, and other actors.