PAQUED: DRC. Projet d’Amélioration de la Qualité de l’Education (PAQUED): 2014 endline report of Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA)

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by the Education Development Center (EDC), the Projet d’Amélioration de la Qualité de l’Education (PAQUED) project was a five-year initiative that aimed to raise student learning through improved teaching and school environments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As a partner in PAQUED, RTI International (RTI) was responsible for adapting and applying the EGRA and EGMA instruments to assess the program impact on student learning outcomes. This document presents a discussion of PAQUED’s impact on three distinct populations of schools. Each discussion reflects a different stage in the significant evolution of PAQUED’s focus and scope that took place between project design in 2009 and a formal realignment that occurred in January 2013. These three populations cannot be compared directly to each other, so each is dealt with in a separate chapter of the report. They are presented in the introduction below in chronological order of their emergence as the point of focus for the PAQUED project; however, in the main body of the report they are presented in reverse chronological order, reflecting the degree to which each was expected to produce meaningful impact.