Schools in developing countries face problems of relatively low school effectiveness in terms of enrolments of eligible age groups; low levels of school completion, even at primary level; and low levels of achievement (cf. Lockheed & Lewin 1993). In Cameroon, every year about 30 % of the pupils leave school without having mastered the skills of numeracy and literacy targeted in the curriculum (UNSECO 2010).

The reasons for this lack of effectiveness are obvious: As various socio-economic figures (cf. OECD 2010) indicate, the situation of education in developing countries is comparably poor and resources sufficient to provide even rudimentary conditions for quality education are often lacking (cf. Johnson 2008, Riddel 2008, Saunders 2000).

Simultaneously, less economically developed countries have – not least in succession of the UN Conference "Education for All" in Dakar in 2000 (cf. UNESCO 2008; 2009) – to expand to address the increasing number and diversity of student populations ensuring that all children and youth, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds, gain access to a quality education (cf. UNESCO 2007). The raise of educational quality is all the more important as education is meanwhile not only regarded as important factor for the individual biography but also as one of the main societal wealth factors (cf. Heimbach-Steins 2009) and developing countries run the risk of getting more and more excluded from participating actively in world economic processes (cf. World Bank 2002).

Referring to the evaluation of a systemic, instructional based school improvement program conducted in the Protestant School Sector of Cameroon the study focuses on identifying strategies for achieving this demand of the Education-for-All Initiative (cf. UNESCO 2008; 2009) in the face of extreme resource constraints, in particular Sub-Saharan African contexts.

The study reports, to what extent a didactical revision of the national curriculum, cooperative school internal teacher trainings concerning instructional based teaching methods and the establishment of a self-evaluation system for the pupils as core measures of the program had an effect on the pupils’ learning outcomes and the capacity-building at institutional level.

The model of quality and quality assurance by Ditton (2011) serves as theoretical framework.

In this model two essential structure characteristics of educational systems are combined: the ‚process character’ indicating that educational processes contribute to the transformation of intentions and entry characteristics into learning results, and a ‚multilevel perspective’ taking into account that educational processes are swayed by divers levels: (1) the level of individuals (pupils and teachers), (2) the level of interaction between pupils and teachers resp. the level of teaching, (3) the level of the educational institution and (4) the socio-regional resp. societal-cultural context.

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