The key messages in this brief are as follows: 1) Africa has experienced strong economic growth despite recent global downturns. There has been a resurgence of traditional sectors such as agriculture and the extractive industries, and promising new sectors have emerged such as Information and Communications Technology (ICT); 2) African economies urgently need highly skilled technicians, engineers, medical workers, agricultural scientists and researchers to fuel these booming sectors.
... See More + Barely 10 percent of jobs in these areas are currently filled by African science and engineering graduates; 3) Higher education, particularly in science and technology, holds the potential to be absolutely transformative for Africa, because it can equip young people with critical knowledge and skills that are in short supply on the continent; 4) Regional "centers of excellence" offer an optimal and cost-effective way to build and sustain excellence in higher education in Africa because they foster regional specialization, concentrate limited toplevel faculty, and generate knowledge spillovers; and 5) The Africa Centers of Excellence initiative, currently being prepared by the World Bank in collaboration with the Association of African Universities, is an innovative regional response to making higher education more relevant to development.
See Less -
The Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) initiative provides a set of metrics for benchmarking service delivery performance in education and health in Africa.
... See More + These metrics fall into the following three categories, or indicators: (i) the availability of key infrastructure and inputs, (ii) the effort exerted by providers, and (iii) the knowledge of providers. Uganda is the second country where a full-fledged SDI has been implemented, following Kenya and a piloted program in Tanzania and Senegal. SDI for Uganda are based on surveys of about 400 primary schools and 400 health facilities, and nearly 5,300 teachers and health providers. In the health sector, Uganda performed better than Kenya on input indicators and adherence to guidelines. However, Kenyan health providers were 20 percent more likely to get the diagnosis right and were twice as likely to correctly manage maternal and neonatal complications. In the education sector, the share of teachers with minimum knowledge was twice as large in Kenya compared to Uganda. Kenyan teachers performed better in every component of the assessment: English, mathematics, and pedagogy. Kenyan students, however, outperformed Ugandan students on the SDI English and mathematics tests. These indicators will enable governments and citizens to identify gaps and track progress within and across countries over time.
See Less -
Over the past decade, some countries of the Middle East and North Africa region have spurred economic growth and improved their global competitiveness by taking the first steps in the direction of the knowledge economy.
... See More + The World Bank Group focuses on Arab societies that deepen their commitment to reforms in four key policy areas: developing more open and entrepreneurial economies, preparing a better-educated and skilled population, improving capabilities for innovation and research, and expanding information and communication technologies. The success of a knowledge-economy strategy depends on coordinated progress on all four fronts, with bold approaches tailored to each country's challenges and opportunities. This report includes chapters organized into three main parts. Part 1 presents the rationale and approach for the transition to the knowledge- and innovation-driven economy. Part 2 describes the policies to be implemented in key areas of the knowledge economy: governance, education, innovation, and information and communication technology. Part 3 discusses economic diversification initiatives that can help countries make the most of their knowledge-economy investments. The three annexes to this report review the literature on the relationship between the knowledge economy and job creation in the Middle East and North Africa region, provide insights on a series of country experiences from across the world in developing knowledge-based development strategies, and survey knowledge-economy issues in several Arab countries and highlight policy initiatives that are adapted to their specific country circumstances.
See Less -
General Economy, Macroeconomics and Growth Study 82736 SEP 17, 2013
This brief summarizes the expanding educational opportunities in remote parts of the world: evidence from a Randomized Control Trial, or RCT of a public-private partnership for the Summer 2009 in Pakistan.
... See More + The program is found to significantly increase child enrollment and reduce existing gender disparities. Enrollment increases by 51 percentage points in treated villages; while girls show an increase 4-5 percentage points greater than boys. The gender gap is found to arise primarily in areas that have access to a government school; and this gap is eliminated by the introduction of a PPRS school. The introduction of PPRS schools crowds out enrollment in both public and private schools, with the impact being greater for public schools. We find no evidence that providing greater financial incentives to entrepreneurs for the recruitment of girls leads to a greater increase in female enrollment than does an equal compensation scheme for boys and girls. Overall the intervention increases enrollment 51 percent compared to control schools. This effect is significant. The effect is slightly larger for girls than boys. However the differential subsidy did not have a statistically significantly larger effect on female enrollment.
See Less -
Since joining the Bologna process in 2005, the Armenian government and higher education institutions have made significant progress in reforming the higher education system.
... See More + Despite reforms, the public perception of higher education governance and management is poor. Reasons for the poor public perception of higher education governance are primarily embedded in system-wide factors. Recent research has identified a governance structure and regulatory framework as key to the development of overall higher education systems. The study finds that underperformance of the higher education system is associated with a legal framework that lacks coherence and the entire system lacks capacity to effectively exercise autonomy and accountability.
See Less -
This issue of L'espoir contains the following headlines: Democratie, l'exception beninoise a l'epreuve ; Doing Business 2011 : regard retrospectif sur quatre pays de la Region Afrique ; Production agricole en Afrique de l'Ouest: les defis de la productivite et de la competitivite ; Togo : les premiers resultats du Projet de Developpement Communautaire ; 2iE ou l'Afrique Competitive ; Evacuation du staff du bureau de la Banque mondiale d'Abidjan : quatre mois deja a Dakar
... See More +See Less -
This study responds to a request from the Government of Chile and a concern for municipalities and large sections of the public on the agenda of decentralization in Chile.
... See More + It addresses an issue that is fundamental not only for the future of Chilean decentralization process at the municipal level, but also for the consolidation of social equity, progress towards sustainable development, combating poverty and social and economic fragmentation. Because some dysfunctions and rigidities of the current system have not contributed to improving the quality of services and have even provided a socio-economic fragmentation of users, some are certainly more obvious and evident as in the case of municipal education. The paper is based on the decentralization of primary and secondary public education which is not producing the results that are demanded of it and there is awareness that primary health care can be improved to more adequately meet citizens' expectations. The document examines the reasons why decentralization does not appear to have contributed as expected to the improvement of key local services since the early 1980's. The study proposes recommendations to strengthen the decentralization process with a view to improving the quality of primary and secondary education and primary health care. In addition, it acknowledges that the Chilean model of decentralization of health and education is a partnership and co-responsibility between the various levels of government. This study has as its final objective the recommendation of guidelines or criteria for devolution of power to the municipal level. The recommendations are divided into two sections: (i) specifically for health and education, which is the deeper and more immediate objective in this study, and (ii) for other skills that are in sight of being transferred.
See Less -
This paper considers the effects of a gender-targeted conditional cash transfer program for girls in classes 6 to 8. It finds that the program is successful in increasing the enrollment of girls in classes 6 to 8 as intended.
... See More + It also finds evidence to suggest that the program generated positive spillover effects on the enrollment of boys. This success does, however, appear to be poised to come at a cost. The student-teacher ratio in treated districts is also climbing. This suggests that in the absence of active steps to address these increasing student-teacher ratios, instructional quality is likely to suffer. The success of the program appears to be driven by enrollment increases in urban schools. This suggests the need for a reassessment of the targeting criteria in rural schools.
See Less -
Policy Research Working Paper WPS5257 MAR 01, 2010
This note sums up results and lessons learned from an impact assessment of school closures on dropout rates in Bulgaria. The assessment was undertaken jointly by the Government of Bulgaria's Impact Evaluation Task Force and the World Bank.
... See More + It was compiled to share the results with a larger audience, and therefore focuses more on results and lessons learned from the process and less on the methods and technical aspects. This note is primarily about the impact of school closures on dropout rates, but it should also be seen in the larger context whereby Bulgaria has an important challenge in keeping children of mandatory school age in schools. The report is divided into four sections: (1) background; (2) the challenge of estimating the impact of school closures on dropout rates; (3) results on dropout rates and school closures; and (4) lessons for the future.
See Less -
This paper examines the assertion that returns to schooling increase as an economy transitions to a market environment. This claim has been difficult to assess as existing empirical evidence covers only a few countries over short time periods.
... See More + A number of studies find that returns to education increased from the "pre-transition" period to the "early transition" period. It is not clear what has happened to the skills premium through the late 1990s, or the period thereafter. The authors use data that are comparable across countries and over time to estimate returns to schooling in eight transition economies (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia) from the early transition period up to 2002. In the case of Hungary, they capture the transition process more fully, beginning in the late 1980s. Compared to the existing literature, they implement a more systematic analysis and perform more comprehensive robustness checks on the estimated returns, although at best they offer only an incomplete solution to the problem of endogeneity. The authors find that the evidence of a rising trend in returns to schooling over the transition period is generally weak, except in Hungary and Russia where there have been sustained and substantial increases in returns to schooling. On average, the estimated returns in the sample are comparable to advanced economy averages. There are, however, significant differences in returns across countries and these differentials have remained roughly constant over the past 15 years. They speculate on the likely institutional and structural factors underpinning these results, including incomplete transition and significant heterogeneity and offsetting developments in returns to schooling within countries.
See Less -
Policy Research Working Paper WPS4225 MAY 01, 2007
Flabbi, Luca; Paternostro, Stefano; Tiongson, Erwin R.
Instead of mean-tested conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments.
... See More + This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend program in Punjab, Pakistan: Did the intervention increase female enrollment in public schools? To address this question, the authors draw on data from the provincial school censuses of 2003 and 2005. They estimate the net growth in female enrollments in grades 6-8 in stipend eligible schools. Impact evaluation analysis, including difference-and-difference (DD), triple differencing (DDD), and regression-discontinuity design (RDD) indicate a modest but statistically significant impact of the intervention. The preferred estimator derived from a combination of DDD and RDD empirical strategies suggests that the average program impact between 2003 and 2005 was an increase of six female students per school in terms of absolute change and an increase of 9 percent in female enrollment in terms of relative change. A triangulation effort is also undertaken using two rounds of a nationally representative household survey before and after the intervention. Even though the surveys are not representative at the subprovincial level, the results corroborate evidence of the impact using school census data.
See Less -
Policy Research Working Paper WPS4102 DEC 01, 2006
Will developing countries be able to compete in the knowledge economy or do they face a future of increasing exclusion, unable to develop skills required for the twenty-first century?
... See More + This report poses three queries in light of this question: What is the role of higher education in supporting and enhancing the process of economic and social development? What are the major obstacles that higher education faces in developing countries? How can these obstacles best be overcome? This report helps guide the reader through both the older problems and new realities faced by higher education. It avoids treating in detail topics that have been fully and frequently examined by others, such as financing and the use of new technologies in education, and concentrates instead on areas that have received little consideration, especially those that reflect new pressures on the system. Expansion, differentiation, and the knowledge revolution are discussed in detail, as are neglected topics of considerable current importance, such as the governance of higher education, the need to consider higher education as a system, and the public interest in higher education. Also included are substantial discussions on improving science and technology research and instruction in institutions of higher education, and on the nature and importance of general education. Some empirical support is provided from case studies and statistical analysis. Each chapter focuses on a major issue in higher education.
See Less -
Publication 20182 JUL 01, 2006
Task Force on Higher Education and SocietyEnglish,
Spanish
This environmental management plan for the Tunisia Higher Education Reform Support Project, which builds educational facilities, proposes measures to alleviate negative environmental impacts produced during the implementation of project components.
... See More + Adverse impacts comprise covering vehicles that transport sand, using water-spraying to minimize dust; fencing off the construction site; avoiding work at night and using silencers for machinery and equipment to reduce noise; equipping the workplace with drinking water and septic tanks for individual use, and transporting and treating waste to reduce water and soil pollution; posting warning signs and assigning security to the site to reduce accidents; avoiding material transport during periods of heavy traffic; informing the appropriate authorities about chance finds of archeological works; establishing adequate household garbage and waste storage; coordinating waste collection and transport services with the municipalities; equipping local authorities to collect recyclable waste; equipping laboratories with waste pre-treatment and separation systems; and reducing effluent discharge.
See Less -