Assessing the most beneficial medium for scaling up and implementing Aflatoun’s life skills and financial education program
The Government of Himachal Pradesh has teamed up with Aflatoun’s founding partner MelJol to utilize education as a long-term strategy and foster socio-economic development. They have implemented Aflatoun’s life skills and financial education program in 90 schools. Considering the program’s success, the teams have planned to scale up and fully integrate the program into the state’s formal school system. However, there is no clear decision on whether the state government or an NGO will facilitate this scaled-up implementation. This study by Sambodhi was planned to assess the difference in this program’s impact when implemented by an NGO compared to when implemented by the Himachal Pradesh state government.
The approach included randomized controlled trials (RCT) and qualitative assessments. RCT was conducted in both phases with a sample of 30 interventions and 30 control schools. Results from the two RCTs helped assess the difference in impact as per the objective.
The following activities were performed:
- developing Theory of Change for the intervention,
- developing research design for RCT,
- developing protocol paper for the RCT,
- building tools for data collection and conducting fieldwork to collect information on outcome indicators, and
- reporting and dissemination of insights to facilitate in program scale-up.