Nigeria - Edo Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation Operation Project

Overview & Synopsis

Ratings for the Edo Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation Operation Project for Nigeria were as follows: outcomes were moderately satisfactory, the Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and the monitoring and evaluation quality was substantial. Some lessons learned included: setting a short-term target of one textbook per three students helped address initial resource constraints. However, this stopgap measure may have inadvertently established a substandard norm, as some teachers and principals began to view this ratio as adequate, despite it falling below benchmarks in comparable education systems. The key lesson is that resource strategies must balance short-term practicality with long-term educational goals. Going forward, ensuring one textbook per student should be prioritized to enhance instructional quality and support better learning outcomes. Despite improvements in classroom practices through structured pedagogy and edtech tools, gaps in teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge persist. High presence and observation rates alone have not translated into strong teaching quality. The lesson here is that improving teacher effectiveness requires a comprehensive strategy: merit-based recruitment, stronger preservice training, regular knowledge assessments, and better and sustained implementation of teacher support policies. Programs like EdoSTAR fellows can be further leveraged to attract and retain qualified teachers. Single-state operations, while offering opportunities for focused engagement and government-led reform, can also be particularly vulnerable to political transitions. In Edo State, strong political commitment and leadership at the highest levels enabled the rapid and effective rollout of EdoBEST. However, this centralized ownership also posed sustainability risks when government leadership changed. A key lesson is that long-term reform success requires deep and widespread institutional ownership, beyond political leadership. Embedding program implementation and accountability mechanisms at all levels, including local government, schools, and communities, is essential to sustaining reform momentum through electoral cycles and administrative transitions.