Project: Impact Evaluation of Girls’ Education in Zimbabwe

Across rural Zimbabwe, girls face unique challenges to success. Poverty, early marriage and pregnancy, and a range of other factors lead girls to be less likely than boys to complete higher levels of education. The Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) is a Department for International Development program that aims to improve outcomes for girls in Zimbabwe and in 17 other countries around the world by funding girls’ education projects. IGATE (Improving Gender Attitudes, Transition and Education Outcomes) is a World Vision led initiative that uses this funding to encourage community development in ten of the poorest districts in rural Zimbabwe.

Limestone has been selected by World Vision and DFID to serve as the External Evaluator of the project for the baseline, midline, and endline impact evaluations for the second wave of the Girls Education Challenge (GEC-T) project in Zimbabwe. The work includes:

• Designing the Monitoring and Evaluation strategy; 
• Developing, calibrating, programming, and implementing qualitative and quantitative evaluation instruments;
• Consulting on project implementation plans;
• Overseeing data collection and monitoring data quality; 
• Using qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to conduct a mixed-methods impact evaluation that included the use of innovative econometric and machine learning techniques. This will include Outcome Harvesting techniques for the endline evaluation to study the project’s impact since COVID-19.

Impact: Focusing on learning, transition, and sustainability outcomes, in addition to several intermediate outcomes, the team found qualitative and quantitative evidence that IGATE-T increased household and community support for girls’ education while also leading to a significant improvement in essential foundational literacy skills. The team was able to further demonstrate that the project successfully improved transition rates for girls who were originally struggling most in literacy. 

Limestone is currently conducting the Endline evaluation for the IGATE-T evaluation, which will integrate traditional mixed-methods evaluation approaches with Outcome Harvesting to study the impact that the project has had on education outcomes since COVID-19 led to widespread school closures.