Impact Evaluation and Policy Research

Many countries in Africa have placed education at the center of their social and economic development strategies. Although much has been achieved across the region, some challenges remain: millions of children are still not enrolled in primary school; girls, children from poor families, and those from rural areas are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to schooling; and learning outcomes are weak.

[Impact Evaluation] Education systems in developing countries are often centrally managed in a top-down structure. In environments where schools have different needs and where localized information plays an important role, empowerment of the local community may be attractive, but low levels of human capital at the local level may offset gains from local information. This paper reports the results of a four-year, large-scale experiment that provided a grant and comprehensive school management training to principals, teachers, and community representatives in a set of schools.

[Impact Evaluation, SIEF] Timeline: 2014-2018. Evaluation: In Chad, almost all children go to primary school, but students perform poorly on assessments and many leave school before finishing. Teaching quality tends to be low, and many primary school teachers are contract teachers, not civil servants, and their payments are low and often delayed. As part of efforts to strengthen the education system, the Government of Chad is instituting a new way to pay contract teachers in rural parts of the country.

This report aims to analyze the extent to which current governance and management practices contribute to explaining differences in education outcomes, focusing on three regions of Cameroon: the Littoral, Far North, and North West. The three regions chosen for this study differ considerably in terms of education performance, with the Far North being the weakest at one end of the spectrum, and the Littoral region being one of the best at the other end. The report explores the connections between governance and educational outcomes in these three regions, using a qualitative approach.

This report examines youth in post-conflict Burundi. The research responds to the nascent but growing body of knowledge on conflict, young men and gender. War and violence have devastated societies and economies throughout Africa with young men being the main perpetrators of this violence. This research attempts to contribute to this body of knowledge. It looks at youth and young men in particular in two countries emerging from years of ethnic conflict, with a view to identifying if gender norms may increase the risk of renewed conflict.

This paper investigates the effect of exposure to violent conflict on human capital accumulation in Burundi. It combines a nationwide household survey with secondary sources on the location and timing of the conflict. Only 20 percent of the birth cohorts studied (1971-1986) completed primary education. Depending on the specification, the probability of completing primary schooling for a boy exposed to violent conflict declines by 7 to 17 percentage points compared to a nonexposed boy, with a decline of 11 percentage points in the preferred specification.

Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. To address the endogeneity of child ability measures, the analysis uses rainfall shocks experienced in utero or early childhood to instrument for ability. Negative shocks in utero lead to 0.24 standard deviations lower ability z-scores, corresponding with a 38 percent enrollment drop and a 49 percent increase in child labor hours compared with their siblings.

[Impact Evaluation] The authors conduct a randomized experiment in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional. Families under the conditional schemes were required to have their children ages 7-15 enrolled in school and attending classes regularly. There were no such requirements under the unconditional programs.

Human development is one of the pillars of Botswana?s Country Partnership Strategy with the World Bank (2009-13). The Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) is in line with Botswana?s ?vision 2016,? which, in terms of human development, envisions the transformation of Botswana to ?an educated and informed nation? and to ?a prosperous, productive and innovative nation? as two key cornerstones of the strategy.

Botswana's economic growth has hinged on its abundant natural resources, particularly diamonds, which generate nearly half of its fiscal revenues. In terms of sustainable growth, this dependency on natural resources poses the biggest challenge for the country. To prepare Botswana for ?life after diamonds,? the government developed a growth paradigm in its ?vision 2016? strategy document (Presidential Task Group 1997), which suggests that the development of ?new economy? skills will play an extremely important role in the country?s future.