Primary

Although more children than ever are starting school in Africa, in many countries dropout rates remain high and few students complete their schooling, especially girls. Results-based financing (RBF) has been used in many developing countries to attempt to incentivize various stakeholders such as students, parents, and teachers to achieve better results. RBF mechanisms work by linking financial incentives to measurable results, for example school attendance, dropout rates, or student test scores.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank co-funded an evaluation that compared the effectiveness of two different teacher performance pay systems in early primary schools in Tanzania. These performance pay systems are part of KiuFunza , an experimental teacher pay program introduced by Twaweza East-Africa, a civil society organization, in collaboration with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Economic Development Initiatives (EDI).

Many education systems around the world have reached nearly universal access to schooling, but ensuring high quality learning for all students has proven to be more difficult to achieve. Results-based financing (RBF) has the potential to transform the way in which education systems improve by incentivizing students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders to achieve better results. RBF mechanisms work by linking financial incentives to measurable results such as school attendance, dropout rates, student test scores, or other indicators of education quality.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank provided funding to the Government of Haiti with the goal of establishing the preconditions for the adoption of RBF in the Haitian National Ministry of Education and Professional Training (Ministère de l'Education National et de la Formation Professionnelle, MENFP). To this end, the grant funded the development of a quality assurance system (QAS) based on specific standards for the most important dimensions of educational quality in the country.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured the effectiveness of both financial and non-financial incentives at the student, classroom, and school levels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A new classroom routine was designed to encourage all grades 5 and 6 students to take home a classroom textbook and use it to study for a weekly quiz.

Teach is an observation tool that captures: (i) the time teachers spend on learning and the extent to which students are on task, and (ii) the quality of teaching practices that help develop students’ socio-emotional and cognitive skills.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded the development of a Management & Information System to monitor the quality of the education system in Colombia. This system builds on existing monitoring tools, which focus on outcome measures such as test scores but do not capture intermediate quality indicators that can shed light on how learning outcomes are achieved.

This policy note is an attempt to systematically analyze and document emerging trends in the evolution of students’ learning outcomes in Tanzania’s primary schools. The note is based on two rounds of the Service Delivery Indicators Survey in Tanzania, 2014 and 2016, and provides guidance to the Government on: (1) regional, district and school-level variations in gains in pupil achievement scores; (2) student, teacher and school level factors associated with learning outcomes; and (3) key observable factors associated with highest gains in test scores.

In this short note, we summarize findings from a forthcoming analysis for 39 countries with unusually large over-enrollment in the early primary grades. We investigate the scope of the problem, the underlying causes and some potential solutions. Our analysis reveals that this over-enrollment is explained primarily by excessive, sustained repetition in the early grades. This pattern results in substantial system inefficiencies and wastage. We discuss policy implications related to expansion of pre-primary education, improvement of quality in the early grades and allocation of resources. 

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded the development of a Management & Information System to monitor the quality of the education system in Colombia. This system builds on existing monitoring tools, which focus on outcome measures such as test scores but do not capture intermediate quality indicators that can shed light on how learning outcomes are achieved.