There is an underinvestment in kindergarten (KG) teachers in Ghana. Among other approaches, this project will use an ongoing impact evaluation, and quantify perceptions by and of kindergarten teachers, to help tackle key challenges for recruitment, motivation and retention in the kindergarten sector.
High mortality risks can lead to inefficient investments in human capital (Estevan and Baland, 2007). Stakeholders in Ghana, including the Director General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), have argued that this same mechanism is historically the driving factor of underinvestment in kindergarten in the country, relative to higher grades.
An important postulated consequence is that trained kindergarten teachers move to higher grades not just due to better pay, but also due to recognition and status, leaving kindergartens with unskilled or lower-skilled staff.
However, perceptions by and of kindergarten teachers have to date not been quantified and little is known whether, and to what extent, parental-engagement policies can alter these perceptions. As the status and perceptions of women are integral to perceptions of the sector, questions around gender and the labour market will also be a valuable strand of inquiry under this project.
In this project, we will leverage the ongoing impact evaluation of the scaled intervention by the Government Education Service and NGO Lively Minds, and the reported perceptions of kindergarten teachers.
Our quantitative analysis will be complemented by a qualitative study. We will then estimate intervention impacts on these variables by exploiting the experimental variation induced by the randomised control trial (RCT) design of the evaluation. The qualitative work will dig deeper into potential mechanisms driving the quantitative findings.
Our research will support policymakers to be able to identify and tackle some of the key challenges for recruitment, motivation and retention in the kindergarten sector.