The research project “Evaluation of a Digital Skills Program for TVET Teachers in Rwanda” will evaluate the impact of the digital skills training program on teachers’ digital and pedagogical competence, their teaching practice, and students’ test scores. In addition, the researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of various randomly assigned behavioral incentives to motivate teachers to complete the program. Results from this project will flow into future program designs in Rwanda as well as scaling and replication in other regions of the world.  

“Technical and vocational education is a central pillar of policy designed to integrate young people into labor markets, especially in African countries where higher education is in short supply and youth unemployment is sometimes high,” says Raji Jayaraman. “By suspending classroom training, COVID-19 derailed conventional vocational training, but it also opened up online courses as a possible alternative for parts of the training. Teachers need digital skills in order to take advantage of this opportunity, and this project will rigorously evaluate whether training them in these skills improves educational outcomes. Evaluations like this are important because education is key to poverty alleviation and economic growth. But budgets are tight, so you only want to invest in – and scale – programs that are effective. The fact that we have policy makers who are brave enough to ask for an honest answer to whether an intervention is impactful, using rigorous empirical methods, is amazing.” 

The project “Evaluation of a Digital Skills Program for TVET Teachers in Rwanda” is supported by the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) with funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).