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The development of pertinent and effective in-service teacher training remains a policy challenge for many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ecuador stands out as a country in the region that has made significant investments in teacher training in the past decade. However, most in-service training provision has been designed without enough elements to properly address teachers' skills gaps. This paper proposes a roadmap for improving the design of in-service teacher training in Ecuador using available data from student and teacher assessments.

This report provides a snapshot of the basic education system in Tanzania using a combination of data collected from the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) Surveys in 2014 and 2016, and data from SABER Service Delivery 2016 (i.e. Development-World Management Survey, Classroom Observation). Using data collected through direct observations, unannounced visits, and tests from primary schools in Tanzania, the report highlights strengthens and weaknesses of the education system and identifies specific bottlenecks that inhibit student learning.

Good education changes lives. It is therefore unsurprising that improved schooling plays a central part in most development strategies. At the same time, the expansion of school attainment alone is not sufficient to guarantee improved welfare. This open access book focuses on one country in West Africa, Togo, to explore what a country that has successfully increased enrollment rates can do to enhance learning outcomes.

The authors explore the effects of decentralization on education and health in Ethiopia using an original database covering all of the country’s regions and woredas (local governments). Ethiopia is a remarkable case in which war, famine and chaos in the 1970s-1980s were followed by federalization, decentralization, rapid growth and dramatic improvements in human development. Did decentralization contribute to these successes?

All children should be able to read by age 10. Reading is a gateway for learning as the child progresses through school—and conversely, an inability to read slams that gate shut. Beyond this, when children cannot read, it’s usually a clear indication that school systems aren’t well enough organized to help children learn in other areas such as math, science, and the humanities either.

Using a new data set comprised of publicly available information, this paper provides cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social spending that covers the three sectors of health, education, and social protection has proven to be a challenging task. Only for health spending is there high data coverage over time and across countries. Education and, especially, social protection display large gaps. Increases in social sector spending have generally been slow and unsteady.

Human capital is central to the World Bank Group’s efforts to end extreme poverty by 2030 and raise the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of people in each country. The vision of the Human Capital Project is a world in which all children reach their full potential growing up well-nourished and ready to learn, attain real learning in the classroom, and enter the job market as healthy, skilled, and productive adults.

Cambodia’s education sector has faced and overcome a number of challenges in recent history. Several decades of political and social unrest caused by the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and Vietnamese occupation in the 1980’s dealt a severe blow to the education system and left it in a state of disintegration. Primary and secondary enrollment through to the 1980’s fell, with school attendance dramatically lower for individuals who were teenagers in 1975 compared to previous or subsequent cohorts (de Walque, 2004).

The results in education for all children (REACH) trust fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that assessed the early impact of a performance-based school grants program on student learning in Indonesia. This evaluation focused on two separate effects in the first two years of the new program: the effect of announcing the performance-based incentive to schools, and the effect of receiving the bonus for top performing schools. Announcing the performance incentive had different impacts on primary and junior secondary schools.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank has funded a pilot of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) in Guangdong, China to test its usefulness as a tool to assess teaching practices. The pilot was also designed to establish a proof of concept for using classroom observations to measure the impact of teacher training and incentivize training providers within an RBF mechanism.