TARGET

TARGET provides essential technical support to projects focused on improving quality of education for all in Ethiopia, with an emphasis on inclusion and equity for marginalised learners.

The TARGET (Technical Assistance to Reinforce GEQIP-E in Ethiopia) programme is a £19.5 million package of technical assistance funded by the UK government to support the World Bank-managed multi-donor trust General Education Quality Improvement Programme for Equity (GEQIP-E). 

The programme’s mission is to work with the government to address systemic and learning challenges. It has four key areas of focus:  

1. Strengthening the delivery capacity of the education system, leaders, and experts by applying embedded delivery and data approaches, making use oftechnical experts to implement the GEQIP-E.
2. Reforming national school leadership by bringing together university coaches and teaching and learning experts to support school leaders in their practice.  
3. Improving school performance through enhanced school leadership, supporting existing school leaders through in-service capacity building to strengthen instructional leadership, community engagement, inclusion, and teachers’ classroom performance, especially in worse-performing schools.  
4. Improving monitoring, evaluation, and research at federal and regional government levels. The team undertakes monitoring, evaluation and learning activities that feed into TARGET’s adaptive programme management to support the improvement of learning outcomes.

Impact

By August 2023, the TARGET programme had reached 5.5 million learners and provided training and support to over 9,800 school ‘leaders of learning’.

School leaders who have undertaken TARGET national senior leadership training – compared to those not in the TARGET programme – demonstrate significant improvements in the quality of school improvement planning, teaching for learning, safeguarding, lesson quality, data use and management and in teacher attendance. In intervention schools, there were greater improvements across all metrics compared to those not on the programme, particularly in treating boys and girls equally.

Competency assessment results show that the proportion of school leaders at the level of ‘competent leader’ or above rose from 15% to 74% in the three years to 2022. In the same period, student agreement with the statement, ‘There are special places in our school where girls can go to feel safe and protected’ rose by 54 points from 43% to 97% in TARGET intervention schools (but dropped to 29% in non-intervention schools).

TARGET partners also report that, because we are providing training in how to plan lessons effectively for learners with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), learning connections with this group rose by almost 10%.