Determinants of Oral Reading Fluency among Learners in Kenya's Early Grades

Kenya's primary-school reading crisis has been documented by a decade of donor- and NGO-funded early-grade reading interventions, each closed out with an end-of-project EGRA evaluation. This article synthesises the reported statistical findings of fifteen such Kenyan end-of-project evaluations (2014– 2024) alongside twelve peer-reviewed studies to examine how oral reading fluency among Grade 1 and Grade 3 learners relates to gender, age, pre-school attendance, grade repetition, home and parental background, and teacher instructional practice. The synthesis finds that teacher practice coaching, structured lesson guides, print exposure, and read-aloud instruction are the characteristics most consistently and strongly associated with ORF gains across projects, and that their effects interact with, and in several cases outweigh, fixed child characteristics such as gender. Home and parental background remain comparatively under-measured in Kenyan endline evaluations relative to child- and teacher-level variables. Implications for evaluation design and policy are discussed.