Following the introduction of Free Primary Education in Kenya in 2003, there was concern that despite the increase in enrollment, the quality of the education provided was deficient, as indicated by the
low pupils’ scores. The purpose of designing and evaluating policies to improve school performance thus became a new priority for education in Kenya. One of the proposed solutions was the scaling up of a “contract teacher intervention”, previously introduced by an NGO in Western Kenya, where it was shown to have raised test scores for primary students.
