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The Strategic Approach to Girls' Education (STAGE) project developed and implemented an intervention that helped marginalized out-of-school girls in the northern regions of Ghana enter and be successful in primary school. STAGE builds on the Government of Ghana's Complementary Basic Education policy, which supports an accelerated learning program that provides literacy and numeracy classes in mother tongue to out-of-school girls between 8 and 14 years of age. This article reviews the literature that informed the design of STAGE, describes the intervention, reports on the impact on its participants, and suggests a model for replicating this intervention in Ghana and adapting it for implementation in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 4.6 calls for all youth and a substantial proportion of adults to be able to read. Progress toward achieving this goal began after the World Conference on Education for All in 1990. Two decades after the conference, national governments, international donor agencies, and local and international nongovernmental organizations had built schools, trained teachers, and distributed textbooks. Though that work continues, the focus has turned to ensuring that all children learn to read. Achieving Target 4.6 requires reform of national education systems built up over the last three decades. This article reviews the literature that informs efforts to change education systems in ways that support early-grade reading. Now is the time to focus on reforming and strengthening the education systems that will achieve Target 4.6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States Agency for International Development, World Vision, and the Australian government established All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) to address problems that prevent children from gaining foundational reading skills. ACR GCD mobilizes the private sector, academia, and nongovernmental organizations in problem-solving dialogues that support the development, testing, and promotion of new solutions to these problems. It also advances EdTech innovation and research to improve reading outcomes for marginalized children in low-resource contexts to effectively build bridges over system constraints in ways that lower the risk of pilot-testing and eventual large-scale replication. This case study describes some of ACR GCD's funded innovations and its nontraditional approach to employing grant competitions (in which innovators propose solutions to broadly described problems) and prizes (in which innovators develop solutions to specifically identified problems). For innovations that have been evaluated, this article summarizes the findings on their impact on learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world community committed to support universal access to basic education in 1990. Since then, schools have been built and teachers hired and trained. Twenty years later, many more students were in primary school, but learning assessments showed that most were not learning how to read well enough to use reading to learn. The world com- munity turned its attention to improving instruction. As instruction improved, more students could decode words and read with improved speed and accuracy. However, reading comprehension was still low. Now is the time for the world community to come together and make a commitment that all students will learn to read with sufficient comprehension to use reading to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes two assessment tools that have been used to assess the reading skills of youth participating in alternative basic skills and livelihood skills training programs. The Rapid Assessment of Reading Skills (RARS) was developed to identify potential participants who needed to improve their reading skills before beginning training and to assign them to the proper level of basic reading instruction. The Out-of-School Literacy Assessment incorporates RARS into a more complex impact evaluation tool. Both assessment tools can also be used to inform program design, define benchmarks, and assess impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]