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PlayMatters, an education initiative led by IRC in partnership with the LEGO Foundation and a consortium including Plan International, War Child Alliance, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Behavioural Insights Team, brings Learning through Play (LtP) into refugee-hosting schools across Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania. Since 2020, the program has reached over 14,000 teachers and 900,000 children, replacing rote “chalk-and-talk” teaching with active, child-centered methods designed to improve both learning and wellbeing for refugee and host-community children alike. A new cost-effectiveness analysis, conducted during the program’s third cohort in Uganda through a randomized controlled trial, set out to answer a practical question for funders and decision-makers: does this approach deliver enough impact to justify continued investment and scale-up?
The findings suggest it does. Improving a teacher’s classroom practice cost roughly $657 per teacher — close to the $668 achieved in an earlier Ethiopia evaluation, where the same model also lifted children’s literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning. Improving occupational wellbeing cost more, ranging from $2,332 to $6,148 depending on the measure. Compared with the Pakistan Reading Project, a similarly large-scale literacy initiative, PlayMatters achieved comparable or stronger results at similar cost. With low- and middle-income countries facing a $97 billion annual financing gap to meet global education targets, the brief argues that PlayMatters represents a promising, cost-effective model worth replicating and refining across additional contexts.
