Ongoing projects

• ERC Starting grant: Leveraging early-adolescence for development: Experimental and longitudinal evidence from Ghana (with S. Wolf, S. Afu-Adwarfua, R. Appiah, and E. Avornyo). More info soon.
  
• Nudges to improve learning and gender parity: Supporting parent engagement and Ghana’s educational response to Covid-19 using mobile phones  [AEA RCT Registry ID: AEARCTR-0006118]
  

The Parental Nudges Project (PNP) is a household-level intervention in Ghana designed in partnership with Movva Technologies to improve school-aged children’s learning outcomes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and to address gender parity in educational outcomes. Through the program, parents and other primary caregivers receive text messages in simple English with behavioral nudges aiming to improve engagement with their children’s learning and social-emotional development. The goal of the messages is to bring parents closer to their child’s school life by prompting them to engage with their children on topics such as school, future plans and sharing how they overcame similar challenges at their age. Further, some households are randomly assigned to receive messages that promote gender-equitable outcomes in education and broader development. Partnering with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Movva, our goal is to evaluate the impact of the text-message-based behavioral change intervention on improving parental engagement in educational activities, parental beliefs about returns to education, as well as improvements in children’s learning, enrollment, attendance and gender parity in education. The co-Principal investigator is Sharon Wolf.

• Examining long-term effects of Quality Preschool for Ghana’ Interventions on Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes in Middle-Childhood. Link to British Academy project page
  

Working with Innovations for Poverty Action and Ghana's Ministry of Education, this project evaluates the long-term effects of a teacher in-service and coaching program, with and without parental awareness meetings, to evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches in improving kindergarten quality and children's school readiness in Ghana.  The co-Principal Investigators are Sharon Wolf, Lawrence Aber, Jere R. Behrman,

• Children's learning and development in the time of Covid19: Evidence from an ongoing longitudinal study in Ghana (with S. Wolf, J. Behrman, L. Aber, E. Tsinigo). Link to UKRI webpage (fieldwork currently ongoing)
  

This study measures the effects of COVID-19 on children’s educational and developmental outcomes and builds on the Quality Preschool For Ghana (QP4G) study, a school-randomized trial conducted in 2015-1026 when children were in pre-primary school. Children and their families have been followed in an ongoing longitudinal study. The study’s results are providing the government and development partners with unique, real-time data to inform remote-learning and social-protection efforts, as well as the re-opening of schools which started in January 2021. The co-Principal Investigator is Sharon Wolf.