School Improvement Loans Linked to Increased Learning Outcomes in Uganda Context and Research Questions Through its partnerships with financial institutions, Opportunity EduFinance provides School Improvement Loans (SILs) to low-fee private schools. As schools make investments thanks to these loans, it has become important to understand: 1. How effective have school investments been in increasing learning outcomes for pupils? 2. What are the most effective investments that a low fee school proprietor can make to increase learning outcomes for pupils? Answering these questions will enable us to identify the most effective school investments and allow Opportunity EduFinance to incentivize schools to direct their resources towards those investments.
Methodology Opportunity EduFinance partnered with University of Chicago’s Center for RISC to measure the effectiveness of School Improvement Loans. As a measure of learning outcomes, we used the Primary Leaving Examination scores for 9580 schools in Uganda from 2010 to 2016 and 2019. Measures of loan amounts, investment types and years were available for 77 schools that worked with Opportunity EduFinance through school profile surveys. We compared the changes in test scores of Opportunity EduFinance schools that made an investment to those schools which made no investments.
Findings 1. We found compelling evidence that the investments made by Opportunity EduFinance schools are improving educational outcomes. Opportunity EduFinance schools that made an investment performed 1.09 points better on average on the Ugandan Primary Leaving Examination test (7.24 percentile points) than the rest of the schools in Uganda. This effect was statistically significant. Student scores also made a statistically significant shift upwards towards Division 1 (highest) and Division 2 (second highest) ratings. This accompanied a reduction in the students scoring Division 3 and below, but those findings were not statistically significant. 3.5% more students achieve Division 1 (significant)
1.09 points improvement
Making an investment
7.24 percentile points better
9.5% more students achieve Division 2 (significant)
After making an investment
3.3% fewer students achieve Division 3 (not significant) 2.8% fewer students achieve Division 4 (not significant) 5.6% fewer students fail the exam (not significant)
Effect on test scores is significant
Percentage of students who do not take the exam does not change significantly.