Learning for All Initiative

Pre-pandemic, more than half of children in low- and middle-income countries were unable to read a simple story by age 10. In the poorest countries, this figure was as high as 80 percent. School closures, which affected over one billion children during the pandemic, have exacerbated low learning and inequity in education systems. In response to the current crisis in education and an increasing demand for actionable evidence, LAI conducts research in key open areas related to foundational literacy and numeracy, and holistic skills and summarizes lessons for policymakers to incorporate into their decisions. LAI aims to improve global learning outcomes by identifying the next generation of promising evidence-based approaches that can be tested, replicated, and adapted by policymakers to their local contexts. In addition to evaluating new innovations, the Initiative also funds evidence-based interventions at a larger scale and in new contexts in order to better understand their generalizability, mechanisms of change, and pathways to scale.