Guinea presents high levels of underemployment, precarious working conditions, and low levels of productivity partly due to the lack of soft and technical skills. A keystone to reduce the mismatch between the skills available and those required in the labor market is education. There is significant room for progress as 70% of the population has completed only a primary school education or less. Action is therefore needed to develop relevant skills, aspirations, and support pupils in the transition into the labor market.

In this context, the INTEGRA-GIZ program consists of teaching primary school teachers to integrate “preparation for professional life” modules in grades 4 and 5. These modules aim at developing valuable skills to integrate society and prepare pupils for future educational and professional choices. In practice, this consists of in-class modules to stimulate social practices (debate, problem solving, group working, etc.) as well as presenting professional occupation options to the pupils.

What methods will be employed?

A counterfactual impact evaluation (CIE) will be conducted to determine the impact of the program on soft skills, education, and life aspirations. This will be done by comparing the pupils receiving the “preparation to professional life” modules to pupils not receiving the modules.

The approach requires to collect data before the start of the intervention (beginning of grade 4) and after the intervention (end of grade 5). Data will be collected on 1680 pupils from 70 different schools in Guinea, among which 50% will be girls to allow investigation of differentiated impacts across gender lines. The baseline data was collected in January 2022.

In addition, C4ED will employ qualitative methods to explore the relevance of the modules and assess the extent to which they accommodate the employers’ and future job candidates’ needs. Furthermore, C4ED will assess the implementation quality and aim to understand why and how the changes (or absence of changes) observed in the CIE materialized.