EIDU

EIDU combines two rigorously evaluated education programs with a cost-effective digital delivery structure, a platform for continuous testing and improvement, and a commitment to evaluation. They are in the process of scaling up to all preschool children in Kenya. The first program they incorporate is training teachers in structured pedagogy. The second is digital personalized learning for students with content from leading global content providers, such as Onebillion.

Structured Pedagogy involves producing structured lesson content for teachers and students, and training teachers in how to teach the new content. A review of the cost-effectiveness of 150 education interventions in the developing world found structured pedagogy to be the intervention that had the highest combination of absolute learning gains with cost-effectiveness. EIDU’s implementation of structured pedagogy is closely related to the one examined in the review, which has been evaluated in a randomized controlled trial, where it demonstrated an effect of 0.25 SD on school readiness scores.

OneBillion is an evidence-focused nonprofit providing digital math and literacy exercises. Randomized controlled trials have found OneBillion software to have 0.4 SD effects on learning outcomes.

EIDU is able to deliver these two programs for $11 per student per year because they have digitized all materials and placed them on smartphones distributed to each of their classes in Kenya. We believe that EIDU is likely to transition to having most of the program administered and funded by the government over time. They plan to continue to improve on their materials by actively monitoring results from each training module that students use from OneBillion as well as opening the EIDU platform for the education research community.

EIDU has also committed to external randomized controlled evaluations currently run by EdTechHub. Preliminary results from internal evaluations suggest that their program is on track to deliver 0.23 SD increases in test scores.

Why do we recommend them?

EIDU stands out among education interventions because it incorporates two of the most rigorously-evaluated and cost-effective interventions shown to boost learning in low and middle income countries. They have hired teacher-trainers from a successful implementation of structured pedagogy, and have developed a more adaptive version of OneBillion software to help students learn from digital exercises.

We believe EIDU has the potential to scale up within a few years working with local governments to reach every preschool child in Kenya. Their early successes working at scale with 94,000 children, and their close partnerships with the Kenyan government make them likely to attain this goal. We believe that the resulting learning gains can meaningfully boost the incomes of all these children when they become adults. Afterwards, EIDU has the potential to scale to hundreds of millions of children in a broad range of countries and grade levels.