Across six Sub-Saharan African countries, grade 4 students of teachers who were hired after a free primary education reform perform worse, on average, on language and math tests--statistically significantly so in language--than students of teachers who were hired before the reform. Teachers who were hired just after the reform also perform worse,…

Teachers are the most important drivers of students' academic achievement and they are at the heart of learning recovery efforts. Finding out the bottlenecks and necessary conditions for ensuring teachers' presence at school and in the classroom is essential. Time to Teach is a mixed methods research initiative that aims to find out the…

In sub-Saharan Africa, the loss of teaching hours due to teacher absenteeism corresponds to a waste of approximately 46 cents for every US dollar invested in education, an annual wastage of 1-3% of GDP. This brief summarizes the results of research in 11 countries in West and Central Africa under the Time to Teach study, a project in UNICEF that…