What the client needed
Zambia's Catch Up programme uses the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach to close gaps in foundational learning. How well it works depends on teachers, and earlier qualitative work had pointed to factors that encourage or discourage them from delivering it.
Busara needed robust quantitative evidence, at scale, on which motivational barriers and levers matter most, so that the programme could be refined before further scale-up.
How M31 Research delivered
M31 Research designed and ran a structured phone survey of Catch Up teachers across Lusaka, Eastern and Central provinces. The questionnaire was piloted with 24 teachers and refined before full rollout in SurveyCTO.
Trained enumerators fluent in Bemba, Lenje, Nyanja and Tonga completed 2,000 interviews. Data was cleaned in Stata to address missing values, outliers and inconsistencies, and visualised in Excel dashboards. Weekly progress reports and continuous quality assurance allowed quick feedback throughout.
What we delivered
- Pilot of survey tools with 24 teachers
- 2,000 phone interviews with Catch Up teachers
- Interviews in four local languages
- Data cleaning and validation in Stata
- Excel charts and dashboards
- Weekly progress reports
What changed for the client
The study produced solid quantitative evidence on the barriers and enablers that shape teachers' delivery of TaRL. The findings fed into a co-design workshop and gave Busara and its partners actionable data to refine teacher engagement, strengthen programme delivery and support the institutionalisation of TaRL in Zambia's education system.
