Managing for results in primary education in Madagascar: evaluating the impact of selected workflow interventions

The impact of specific actions designed to streamline and tighten the workflow processes of key actors in Madagascar's primary education sector are evaluated. To inform the strategy for scaling up, a randomized experiment was carried out over two school years. The results show that interventions at the school level, reinforced by interventions at the subdistrict and district levels, succeeded in changing the behavior of the actors toward better management of key pedagogical functions. In terms of education outcomes, the interventions improved school attendance, reduced grade repetition, and raised test scores (particularly in Malagasy and mathematics), although the gains in learning at the end of the evaluation period were not always statistically significant. Interventions limited to the subdistrict and district levels proved largely ineffective.