In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries.
... See More + The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of schooling" and another in the net present value of potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15 and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual schooling. The results further show that even modest gains in standard deviations of learning -- if sustained over time -- may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better understand the potential benefits of increased learning.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8752 FEB 19, 2019
Reform leaders who want to pursue technically sound policies are confronted with the problem of getting myriad government agencies, staffed by thousands of bureaucrats and state personnel, to deliver.
... See More + This paper provides a framework for thinking about the problem as a series of interdependent principal-agent relationships in complex organizations, where one type of actor, the agent, takes actions on behalf of another, the principal. Using this framework to review and forge connections across a large literature, the paper shows how the crux of state capacity is the culture of bureaucracies -- the incentives, beliefs and expectations, or norms, shared among state personnel about how others are behaving. Although this characterization might apply generally to any complex organization, what distinguishes agencies of the state is the fundamental role of politics -- the processes by which the leaders who exercise power over bureaucracies, starting from the lowest village levels, are selected and sanctioned. Politics shapes not only the incentives of state personnel, but perhaps more importantly, it coordinates their beliefs and expectations, and thereby the performance of government agencies. Recognizing these roles of politics, the paper offers insights for what reform leaders can do to strengthen state capacity for public goods.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8734 FEB 11, 2019
Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood.
... See More + Several parent support programs have shown significant benefits for children's development, but the programs are often expensive and resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The intervention was a modified dialogic reading training program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate books adapted for a low-literacy population. The study used a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n = 357) and their 24- to 83- month-old children ages 24 to 83 months (n = 510) in rural Kenya. The first treatment group received storybooks, while the other treatment arms received storybooks paired with varying quantities of modified dialogic reading training for parents. The main effects of each arm of the trial were examined, and tests of heterogeneity were conducted to examine differential effects among children of illiterate versus literate caregivers. Parent training paired with the provision of culturally appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions among preschool-age children. Treatments involving training improved storybook-specific expressive vocabulary. The children of illiterate caregivers benefited at least as much as the children of literate caregivers. For some outcomes, the effects were comparable; for other outcomes, there were differentially larger effects for children of illiterate caregivers.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8733 FEB 07, 2019
The development objective of the Early Childhood Development (ECD) Project for Sri Lanka is to enhance access to and improve the quality of ECD services for 3-5 year old children in Sri Lanka.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: (1) assessing the potential social impacts of interventions (rehabilitation, extension, upgrade, or construction of early childhood care and development (ECCD) facilities, whether positive or negative, and present mitigation measures which will effectively address these impacts; (2) establishing clear procedures and methodologies for the social screening of activities to be financed by the project; (3) identifying the social risks, and institutional arrangements for implementations of safeguards management pertaining to the project; and (4) identifying gender mainstreaming strategies, citizen engagement steps including a grievance redress mechanism to address community concerns in implementation of the project.
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