In Sidama, Ethiopia, Luminos scaled a structured pedagogy program fivefold. In Tigray, it introduced the model for the first time. Luminos’ newest impact report, published for International Literacy Day, details the results from all 950 classrooms across both regions in the 2025-26 school year.

Among 10-year-olds in sub-Saharan Africa, 20 percent are out of school, and a staggering 70 percent are in schools that fail to teach them to read. Closing those gaps requires more than successful pilots: proven approaches must be designed for and sustained within government education systems.

The Luminos Fund works alongside governments to do exactly that. In Ethiopia, Luminos has partnered with regional education bureaus since 2022 to co-create, pilot, adapt, and scale a joyful, structured pedagogy approach that reaches out-of-school children and improves foundational learning.

A new Luminos report examines what that partnership achieved in the 2025-26 school year as structured pedagogy—daily lesson plans, teacher training and coaching, and regular data collection—reached 950 government classrooms in Sidama and Tigray, and supervision shifted from Luminos and its community partners to government staff in Sidama for the first time.

Across both regions, children made strong gains in literacy and numeracy, reading on average more than twice the rate of peers in conventional classrooms by the end of the program. Of the children who completed the structured pedagogy program, 99 percent qualified to transition into Grade 3.

The 2025-26 school year marks a significant milestone: after years of close partnership, structured pedagogy is becoming a government-owned system that delivers strong literacy gains at scale—already established in one region and taking root in a second.

Key Results

Scaling Luminos’ Structured Pedagogy in Ethiopia

Since 2018, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education has partnered with Luminos on a national strategy to reach out-of-school children: expanding accelerated learning through the government’s own Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). The program condenses Grades 1 and 2 into a single school year, enabling out-of-school and vulnerable children to catch up and rejoin their peers in conventional schools.

As the program expanded rapidly across Ethiopia’s regions, growth began to outpace the coaching and supervision needed to keep teaching quality consistent. In 2022, Luminos partnered with regional governments to layer on structured pedagogy, co-creating more than 1,400 pages of activity-based daily lesson plans in local languages and 500 pages of training manuals. The approach combines hands-on teacher training, ongoing coaching and supervision, and regular data collection. That work involved the regional education bureaus directly from the start.

“We are working closely with Luminos from the very beginning: from the planning stage when we develop materials, to reviewing them, and editing them. In all these processes, our expertise is there and the regional education bureau endorses those materials.” – Mr. Beyene Barasa, Vice President of Sidama Regional State and Head of Regional Education Bureau

Sidama piloted the approach first in 2023-24, and an evaluation involving independently administered assessments found children reading over three times as many correct words in a minute as the 2023 conventional-school average for their grade and language. Luminos and the Tigray Regional Education Bureau adapted the model for the 2025-26 school year.

Sidama: Literacy Gains at Scale

Two assumptions shadow most education programs as they scale up. First, that teaching quality slips when teachers are trained in large cohorts instead of small groups. Second, that government supervisors—who already carry heavier workloads and operate without close day-to-day support from an external partner—cannot sustain the coaching teachers need. In Sidama, the 2025-26 school year tested both: the program grew five times larger, and for the first time, government staff, not Luminos-supported coaches, supervised and coached teachers.

Children made meaningful gains in literacy and numeracy. Many who struggled to connect letters to sounds at the start of the year progressed to reading entire passages, for some their first encounter with independent reading. Oral reading fluency improved from 2 correct words in a minute at the start of the year to 23 correct words in a minute on the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). That is more than double the national average for Sidaamu Afoo reading in Grade 2, and close to the 24 words in a minute recorded the year before, when the program was running at a fifth of its current size and was still under Luminos’ direct supervision.

Numeracy gains followed the same pattern. Children began the year correctly identifying 9.5 numbers in a minute. By the end, they identified 36 numbers in a minute at 96 percent accuracy (the number of items correctly answered divided by the number of items attempted). This sharp increase in both fluency and accuracy shows that number recognition became automatic: children were not just answering faster, they were answering correctly more consistently.

Figure 1. Implementation Fidelity in Structured Pedagogy Classrooms

Tigray: Building Toward Government Ownership

Tigray’s first year had a different job to do. Rather than testing a government transition, it needed to lay the groundwork for one—in a region where the school system was still recovering from the recent civil war, which shut schools for years and left many children out of school altogether. Government supervisors received dedicated tools and training, while Luminos and community partner supervisors supported routine coaching visits, with responsibility gradually transferring to government supervisors.

In this first year, students made substantial gains in literacy and numeracy. Oral reading fluency increased from 0.3 correct words in a minute to 40 correct words in a minute on Luminos’ Rapid Assessment Instrument (RAI). Because the two regions used different assessment instruments, results are not directly comparable between Sidama and Tigray. Compared with the most recent available regional benchmark—Ethiopia’s 2018 national reading assessment—children in the program read at roughly two and a half times the rate of children in conventional classrooms.

In numeracy, number identification increased from 5.1 to 15.7 correct numbers out of 16, and children went from solving essentially no mental math problems at the start of the year to 15.5 in a minute by the end.

Among the children who completed the program, 99 percent qualified for Grade 3. In addition, 89 percent of teachers received their targeted monthly government supervisor visit in this very first year of implementation.

A Model Built for Scale

Sidama and Tigray already show what’s possible: a program can grow five times larger without losing quality, and a new one can launch strong from day one.

“What distinguishes the Luminos Fund is the scientific rigor, the commitment, the flexibility, the training approach, the engagement. All, combined for better learning outcomes—and [they] are the most important reasons that every education bureau and organization should choose the Luminos model.” – Dr. Kiros Guesh, Head of the Tigray Regional Education Bureau.

Teacher Toshine holds her Teacher’s Guide outside her government classroom in Sidama. (Photo: Mekbib Tadesse for the Luminos Fund) 

To read the full report, click here.

To access our structured pedagogy materials in Sidaamu Afoo and Tigrinya, click here.