With increasing political will and recognition of the potential of mother-tongue based multilingual education, research is needed to answer key questions.
Family members play an important role as children's first teachers. Research should explore how informal education and family interaction in a child’s mother tongue may promote literacy, numeracy, and higher order cognitive skills. We need to involve family and community members with diverse language skills in formal school and train teachers to be effective in MTB-MLE classrooms. As knowledge develops, we must get better at communicating research findings so that practitioners, policy makers, and donors are informed and motivated by evidence about how MTB-MLE can be harnessed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.