A member of the faculty bench at the School of Finance and Applied Economics, Muthoni Ng’ang’a  is a co-author of one of the chapters of a recently published book, “Getting to Scale: How to bring development solutions to millions of poor people”. The chapter that Muthoni Ng’ang’a co-authors is titled, ‘Institutional challenges to scaling up learning in Kenya.’

The book, published by Brookings Institution, Washington DC, has different chapters based on different research projects and it explores what it takes to scale up development solutions beyond a pilot program. The chapters all show in different ways the problems of scaling up and the solutions to these problems.

More on the chapter ‘Institutional challenges to scaling up learning in Kenya.’

The question answered here is: Can experimental evidence from small-scale aid projects run by non-government organizations (NGOs) be scaled up to solve social policy challenges?

This chapter is written from the findings of a research carried out between 2009-2013 to measure the impact of  contract teachers on performance in public primary schools in Kenya. The implementing agents for the program were World Vision, a non-governmental organisation and the Ministry of education thus comparing government and NGO implementation across all Kenyan provinces. The research findings showed that the output of ccontract teachers improved performance in schools where the program was implemented by World Vision whereas effects of the contract teacher were significantly lower and indistinguishable from zero in schools where the same program was administered by the Ministry of Education. The question we mostly ask ourselves is what might work but remotely get to ask what might work at scale. Institutional challenges seem to hamper the smooth implementation of programs thus solutions to address these challenges should be sought especially because these same institutions are responsible for taking development innovations to scale.

About Muthoni Ng’ang’a

Ms. Muthoni is a lecturer in Strathmore School of Finance and Applied Economics. She joined the School of Finance in August 2012 although she has been in Strathmore School of Accountancy since 2006. Her research interests are Economics of Education.