The Reading for Ethiopia’s Achievement Developed Monitoring and Evaluation (READ M&E) project, supported by the United States Agency for International Development, is designed to monitor and evaluate the three READ implementation programs. As part of this mandate, READ M&E carried out the endline administration of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) in June 2018 to evaluate the reading fluency and comprehension levels of students in grades 2 and 3 within five regions of Ethiopia in seven languages: Afaan Oromo, Aff Somali, Amharic, Haddiysa, Sidamu Affo, Wolayttatto, and Tigrigna. EGRA’s primary purpose is to inform important policy and pedagogical discussions about where, when, and how to improve the level of reading among early grade students in Ethiopia.

The EGRA tool developed in Ethiopia contains four timed subtasks (letter name recognition, familiar words reading, invented words reading, and oral reading fluency) and three untimed subtasks (phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension).

In June 2018, READ M&E collected data from 459 schools and assessed 17,879 students in grades 2 and 3 with the purpose of serving multiple projects’ evaluation needs. The results presented in this report are based on the 355 schools that were sampled for the 2018 EGRA endline administration, as a follow-up to the 2014 baseline and 2016 midline administrations. This report provides extensive information about the study design, data collection procedure, methods of analysis, and 2018 EGRA results, along with the comparative summaries from the previous two EGRA administrations conducted in 2014 and 2016. The report concludes with a discussion of the study’s main findings and recommendations for policy makers.