Bernard Bahati was leading a task force looking at ways to reform Rwanda’s teachers’ performance contracts to tackle the country’s learning crisis. The team was running an adaptive trial to see if the significant learning gains from the pilot could be replicated at scale when implemented by the government. However, six months into the tria,l a new minister arrived who wanted to scale-up immediately. Caught between political pressure to act quickly and researchers urging caution, Bahati faced a critical decision.

In 2018, Minister of Education Matthew Prempeh was reconsidering the language of instruction (LOI) policy for primary schools in Ghana, a country with more than 80 local languages and English as the national language. Prempeh saw many challenges to implementing the current LOI policy, where Grades 1 through 3 were taught in one of 11 select Ghanaian languages, and Grade 4 onwards taught in English. He considered the options: what LOI policy would best prepare students for a global society?

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