- Project Report
Estimating the Impact of Educational Television on Literacy, Gender, and SEL
Katumbi Lara, Salome Njambi, Anushka Ghosh, Shilvaan Patel and Nicolas Bottan
- November 24, 2024
- 8:39 am
SECTOR
PROJECT TYPE
Location
BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
We study the potential of educational television — delivered at scale and viewed at home without guidance — to improve foundational learning and socio-emotional skills in a low-income environment. Using a randomized encouragement design with 4,300 Kenyan children, we evaluate Nuzo & Namia, a new literacy-focused television show broadcast in English. The intervention increases reading comprehension by 9% of a standard deviation and curiosity by 11.7%, with significantly larger effects among children in predominantly English-speaking households. These impacts are driven by the show’s informational content rather than changes in time use or parental investment. However, the program inadvertently reinforces traditional gender norms, a backfiring effect likely driven by low character relatability. The intervention is highly cost-effective, generating 6.77 learning-adjusted years of schooling per $100. We provide the first experimental evidence that mass media can directly shape children’s learning and mindsets outside the classroom, underscoring both the benefits and potential unintended consequences of edutainment.
THEMATIC AREAS
This paper presents evidence from a large randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Kenya, investigating the effects of watching a new children’s educational TV show at home. One novel aspect of the show is that, besides being instructional, it focuses on changing children’s mindsets about reading, gender attitudes, and socioemotional learning. We recruited 4,300 children from 346 public schools. Students in randomly selected treatment schools received encouragement to watch the publicly broadcast TV show. We sent parents biweekly SMS reminders about the time and channel the TV show aired. Students in control schools did not receive any encouragement or reminders about the show. The TV show is a cartoon program named Nuzo & Namia that targets children aged 6 to 9. It was created in 2023 by Ubongo and its main educational objective is to improve literacy. Additionally, it aims to change gender norms and encourage different forms of socio-emotional learning (i.e., confidence and curiosity). Identifying the causal effect of our encouragement treatment relies on random assignment at the school level. Our primary estimates captured intention-to-treat (ITT) effects. We used a household survey to collect data. We collected end-line data a year after the baseline and after about 9 months of exposure to the TV show. The end-line survey also collected self-reported measures of watching the show to estimate the local average treatment effects (LATE) for treatment compliers