Partnering with GIZ and the Rwanda TVET Board, we are working to understand how Rwandan TVET teachers can be encouraged to complete online digital skills training, and whether upskilling improves teaching practices and students’ learning outcomes.

Scaling Technical and Vocational Training (TVET) by leveraging digital tools has enormous potential. It is especially important in Africa, where a large youth population needs skills training at scale for work readiness. Before deploying these tools, however, TVET teachers themselves require digital skills training. Since 2023, FOS Co-Director Raji Jayaraman has been working together with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, in close collaboraton with the Rwanda TVET Board (RTB), to evaluate the success of a nationwide online basic digital skills and e-pedagogy program for targeting Rwanda’s roughly 8,000 TVET teachers.

The partnership has two main objectives. The first is to encourage TVET teachers to complete the training certification, through a series of low-touch nudges in the form of periodic messages sent to different stakeholders—TVET school leaders, digital skills master trainers, or teachers themselves. The second goal is to evaluate whether, for whom, and under what circumstances the training is successfully changing teaching practices and improving students’ learning outcomes. Learnings of both lines of enquiry can inform the design of ongoing online training programs in a variety of educational settings within Rwanda. It also has potential ramifications for TVET training in other sub-Saharan African settings, where youth unemployment is a looming challenge.

“The collaboration with Raji and her team perfectly illustrates why research and evidence matter. With a research team open to finding solutions to the inevitable adaptations needed in real life during a project implementation, the close development cooperation between ESMT and GIZ not only enables our project to prove results and make fact-based decisions, but it also improved the implementation process from planning until final evaluation. Most importantly, the interim analysis has already provided results that really do matter for Rwanda. RTB used them to fine-tune its strategy for the further development of its digital infrastructure and trainings, and the design and apparent success of nudges can now easily be replicated within Rwanda’s Ministry of Education to expand the effectiveness of such online trainings for around 64,000 students and teachers in general education.”

– Katia Halabi, GIZ