Impact Evaluation and Policy Research

[Impact Evaluation] In Mozambique, net primary school enrollment rates increased from 45 percent in 1998 to 95.5 percent by 2010 (The World Bank, 2011). Despite these gains, children frequently experience delayed entry to school and present severe developmental delays, especially in poor rural communities. To address this situation, a number of early childhood development (ECD) interventions have been initiated, including nutrition programs, parenting programs, and preschool.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Timeline: June 2012 to August 2015. Evaluation: Studies have shown that teacher training combined with accountability strategies can result in improved student learning outcomes in early grades. More research is needed to disentangle the effect of the public information and training. The Government of Mozambique has implemented a pilot program to raise student achievement through teacher training and by providing families with information about reading test results. Researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies on educational outcomes.

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine his or her access to opportunities. The analysis computes the Human Opportunity Index, which measures the extent to which access to basic services is universal and evenly distributed among children of different circumstances.

This paper estimates the causal effects of civil war on years of education in the context of a school-going age cohort that is exposed to armed conflict in Cote d'Ivoire. Using year and department of birth to identify an individual's exposure to war, the difference-in-difference outcomes indicate that the average years of education for a school-going age cohort is .94 years fewer compared with an older cohort in war-affected regions. To minimize the potential bias in the estimated outcome, the authors use a set of victimization indicators to identify the true effect of war.

[Impact Evaluation] This paper provides experimental evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low. It tracks a large fraction of program drop-outs -- a common phenomenon in the training evaluation literature -- and examines the determinants and consequences of dropping out and how it mediates the effects of such programs. The analysis finds that women make decisions in a more constrained environment, and their participation is affected by family obligations.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Timeline: October 2011 to August 2014. Evaluation: Children?s social and cognitive readiness for school is crucial for later success. In Malawi, the government seeks to improve child development outcomes through better preschools. Researchers will study the effects of teacher incentives and training, parental education, and learning materials for children on their physical, emotional, and cognitive development and their readiness for primary school.

[Impact Evaluation] This paper presents findings from the impact evaluation of the Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Young Women (EPAG) project in Liberia. The EPAG project was launched by the Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development in 2009 with the goal of increasing the employment and income of 2,500 young Liberian women by providing livelihood and life skills training and facilitating their transition to productive work.

[Impact Evaluation] This document reports on the results of an Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) study done in Liberia in May 2010. As part of the June 2010 final assessment, the World Bank (WB) funded an implementation of the EGRA with the two main goals: establish a baseline in mathematics that can be used for future efforts, and determine if EGRA plus intervention that was focused on improvements of reading had any secondary impact on improvement of student performance in mathematics. In this report, the data will be presented in two ways.

Youth unemployment and youth exclusion are among the main obstacles to development in Liberia, and gender and youth are positioned prominently in the Government of Liberia?s poverty reduction agenda. The country has a very young population; nearly 60 percent of the population is under the age of 24, many of whom grew up during the Liberian conflict (1989 to 2003). There are few opportunities to enter in wage employment; most of Liberia?s youth earn income on a day-to-day basis by trading on local markets or as day laborers in precarious conditions.

This paper estimates the impacts of secondary school on human capital, occupational choice, and fertility for young adults in Kenya. The probability of admission to government secondary school rises sharply at a score close to the national mean on a standardized 8th grade examination, permitting the estimation of causal effects of schooling in a regression discontinuity framework. The analysis combines administrative test score data with a recent survey of young adults to estimate these impacts.