South Sudan Education
In 2017, USAID’s E3 Education Office approached the LASER PULSE consortium to carry out an evaluation of their Integrated Essential Emergency Education program in South Sudan, implemented by local partners of UNICEF. The purpose of the evaluation was to assess the impact (if any) of UNICEF’s psychosocial support on children’s literacy and math outcomes within an existing and expanding project in South Sudan, in addition to conducting a comparison of literacy, numeracy and well-being/socio-emotional outcomes across male and female students who are receiving the intervention and those who are not.
In its role, the Pulte Institute assisted with quantitative and qualitative data collection over a period of nearly 18 months. This include nearly 4,000 well-being surveys of P3 and P5 students across 60 schools throughout the country, followed by 600 math and literacy-based tests. The Pulte Institute also helped train South Sudanese research assistants to conduct qualitative interviews with stakeholders to compile a case study from each of the five states that hosted the evaluation.
While preliminary analysis as of January 2020 suggests a slight improvement in well-being of students in treatment schools versus control schools, a large amount of data is still being analyzed. Final results are expected to be available in February 2020 with a final report due in March 2020.