Impact Evaluation and Policy Research

[Impact Evaluation] This study uses a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of the training and internship program piloted in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu counties by the Kenya Private Sector Alliance and the Government of Kenya with support from the World Bank?s Kenya Youth Empowerment Project. The program provided three months of classroom-based technical training coupled with three months of internships in private firms to vulnerable youths between ages 15 and 29 years, with vulnerable being defined as those out of school and/or with no permanent job.

[Impact Evaluation] This paper investigates the effects of intermittent screening and treatment of malaria on the health and education of school children in an area of low-to-moderate malaria transmission. A cluster randomized trial was implemented with 5,233 children in 101 government primary schools on the south coast of Kenya in 2010-12. The intervention was delivered to children randomly selected from classes 1 and 5 who were followed up twice across 24 months. Once during each school term, public health workers used malaria rapid diagnostic tests to screen the children.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Kenya is one of the best-educated low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and yet many primary school students read below grade level and seven out of ten students in third grade, for example, cannot read at a second grade level. In poor rural areas, teacher quality is particularly low and the problem is compounded by the fact that many children begin primary school unprepared and with minimal pre-reading skills. In rural parts of western Kenya for example, 84 percent of children under five years old live in homes that do not have a single children?s book.

[Impact Evaluation] Malaria is a serious public health problem in Kenya. Since pregnant women and children under five bear the brunt of mortality and morbidity, the vast majority of malaria interventions focus on these high-risk groups. Because of the growing awareness of linkages between health and educational outcomes, an ongoing study in Kenya evaluates the effectiveness of a malaria control intervention implemented alongside teacher training aimed at enhancing the quality of instruction.

In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. Analysis of household survey data shows this policy contributed to a shift in demand away from free schools, where net enrollment stagnated after 2003, toward fee-charging private schools, where both enrollment and fee levels grew rapidly after 2003. These shifts had mixed distributional consequences. Enrollment by poorer households increased, but segregation between socio-economic groups also increased.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Timeline: November 2011 to April 2015. Evaluation: As in many developing countries, educating the poorest students in Guinea remains a challenge. Often, providing additional funding to schools is not enough to improve learning. The Government of Guinea aims to improve student learning by enhancing teacher performance through an incentive pilot scheme that includes a financial reward, social recognition, and teacher training. Third and fourth-grade teachers from 420 schools participated in the pilot.

One in six children age 6-14 are engaged in labor activities in Ghana, with child employment being the leading alternative to schooling. By exploring structural, institutional, geographic, monetary, demographic, and cultural factors affecting household decisions about child labor, the paper's main purpose is to identify the conditions and characteristics of working children, the root causes of their vulnerability, and thus help to inform decision-makers and actors who draft and implement public policy of possible ways to tackle child labor in Ghana.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Timeline: September 2014-August 2016. Evalution: Ghana has made major strides in education in recent years, registering a completion rate of nearly 100 percent for primary school and 81% for junior high in 2010-11. Despite large investments in basic education, however, learning outcomes have proven far from satisfactory. Fewer than one-third of primary school children have tested proficient in English or mathematics in recent years, and one-fifth of third-graders were unable to read a single word in English in a 2009 assessment.

This paper attempts to explore certain aspects underlying the substantial improvement in 8th grade student performance in Ghana on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study from2003 to 2007. The improvement was largely heterogeneous; in mathematics, performance improved more for students already performing well, while the opposite was the case for science, where students at the bottom of the score distribution experienced a spectacular increase in science scores.

Overcoming the twin challenges of child labour and the youth decent work deficit will be critical to Ghana?s progress towards realising its broader social development goals. The current Report examines the related issues of child labour and youth employment in the context of Ghana.