One of the most common reform strategies to improve education delivery worldwide is the adoption of “delivery units” or “delivery approaches.” These often take the form of dedicated units, located in ministerial offices, that aim to improve the performance of the education service delivery chain and combine a common repertoire of functions—prioritization and target setting, measurement and monitoring, leveraging political sponsorship, accountability and incentives, and problem-solving—in various ways. Such delivery approaches are often modeled on high-profile examples, such as the UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) or Malaysia’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU).

This report synthesises the findings of a multi-country, multi-team research project into the effectiveness of delivery approaches at improving education service delivery. The main countries studied were Ghana, Jordan, and Pakistan, with smaller studies in Sierra Leone and a soon-to-be-completed study in Tanzania. We also conducted a global mapping of the design and adoption of delivery approaches. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed in different ways across our country cases, and all research was based on a common conceptual framework developed by Williams et al. (2021), under the DeliverEd program, which enabled us to synthesize a disparate set of research studies into a common portrait of the ways delivery approaches impacted the education systems across these cases.