Learning Recovery to Acceleration: A Global Update on Country Efforts to Improve Learning and Reduce Inequalities

This report examines what countries are doing to recover and accelerate learning, and how they are doing it. The report aims to identify effective or promising at-scale interventions and policies to recover and accelerate learning, and to distill implementation lessons. The focus is on primary and secondary education and on the responses employed once schools reopened after pandemic-related disruptions. A database was developed for this report that contains the details of the learning recovery and acceleration efforts of a sample of 60 low- and middle-income countries for which sufficient information was available. This report database enabled a landscape review of policy responses. From this sample of 60 countries, 7 were examined further as comprehensive case studies: Cambodia, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Mongolia, Romania, and Zambia. The comprehensive case studies were selected based on their policy responses being (1) evidence-based, (2) government-led, (3) implemented at scale or with scale in mind, and (4) ongoing. A mixed-methods approach was used, relying on desk research; analysis of the report database; existing survey data; and semi-structured interviews with government officials, development partners and World Bank staff.