2026 PRME Education Award

Dr. Kelechi Chijindu Nnamdi, Lagos Business School, Nigeria

Dr. Tochukwu Vitalis Odoh, University of Port Harcourt

This study advances the SDGs primarily by generating rigorous, locally-grounded evidence on Nigeria's Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, directly engaging SDG 4 (Quality Education) through its focus on primary school attendance and literacy, SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) through its evaluation of a nutrition-based intervention, and SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) through its attention to rural-urban and regional disparities in educational outcomes across Nigeria's geopolitical zones. Rather than simply validating the programme, the work contributes to responsible management education by modeling evidence-based, accountability-driven public policy evaluation: it uses nationally representative microdata and robust econometric methods (Linear Probability Modelling with heteroscedasticity-corrected standard errors) to test whether the Nigerian flagship ₦500 billion social investment programme is actually delivering on its stated objectives, and is transparent about the finding that it is not, statistically speaking, moving the needle on attendance or literacy. This kind of honest, methodologically sound impact assessment exemplifies the core PRME principle of equipping decision-makers with the analytical tools and ethical orientation needed to hold large-scale public investments accountable to the populations they are meant to serve, while its policy discussion—weighing continued HGSF investment against alternative uses of public funds such as infrastructure, teacher quality, or cash transfers—models the kind of resource-allocation reasoning central to responsible management of public goods.

This study promotes student skill development by modeling an applied econometrics workflow—sample design, power testing, heteroscedasticity correction, and interaction-term analysis—that gives students a real-world template for impact evaluation. It also illustrates a skill students rarely practice: reporting a null result honestly and translating it into balanced, evidence-based policy discussion rather than searching for significance, a core competency for future managers and policy analysts.

This study provides a transferable template for evaluating large-scale public programmes elsewhere: a rigorous, honest impact-assessment design that other researchers or governments or even policy analysts can replicate to test whether a flagship social investment is actually achieving its goals—and a model for reporting "null" or "undesirable" findings credibly rather than burying them.