Abstract
About 80% of the world's children live in developing countries. Their well-being as adults depends heavily on the education they receive. School enrollment rates have increased dramatically in developing counties since 1960, but many children still leave school at a young age and often learn little while in school. This chapter reviews recent research on the impact of education and other policies on the quantity and quality of education obtained by children in developing countries. The policies considered include not only provision of basic inputs but also policies that change the way that schools are organized. While much has been learned about how to raise enrollment rates, less is known about how to increase learning. Randomized studies offer the most promise for understanding the impact of policies on learning.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Handbook of the Economics of Education |
| Editors | E. Hanushek, F. Welch |
| Pages | 945-1017 |
| Number of pages | 73 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2006 |
Publication series
| Name | Handbook of the Economics of Education |
|---|---|
| Volume | 2 |
| ISSN (Print) | 1574-0692 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Nongovernmental organizations in developing countries may be very well placed to conduct randomized evaluations. Unlike governments, NGOs are not expected to serve entire populations. Also unlike governments, financial and administrative constraints often lead NGOs to phase in programs over time, and randomization will often be the fairest way to of determining the phase-in order. In contrast to developed countries, where NGOs typically do not have sufficient resources to conduct large programs that could serve as a model for public policy, this is not the case in developing countries. Since many NGOs exist and they frequently seek out new projects, NGOs willing to conduct randomized evaluations can often be found. For example, the set of recent studies conducted in Kenya have been carried out through a collaboration with the Kenyan NGO Internationaal Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS) Africa. ICS was keenly interested in using randomized evaluations to see the impact of its programs as well in sharing credible evaluation results with other stakeholders and policymakers. A second example is the collaboration between the Indian NGO Pratham and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that led to the evaluations of the remedial education [ Banerjee et al. (2000) ] and computer-assisted learning programs [ Banerjee et al. (2004) ]. However, while NGOs are well placed to conduct randomized evaluations, expecting them to finance the research is less reasonable, as the results are global public goods. The evaluations of the ICS deworming programs were made possible by financial support from the World Bank, the Partnership for Child Development, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the MacArthur Foundation. In the case of the Indian educational programs, Pratham found a corporate sponsor, India's second-largest bank, ICICI Bank, which was keenly interested in evaluating the impact of the program and helped finance part of the evaluation.
Keywords
- academic skills
- developing countries
- education
- health and schooling
- learning
- quality of education
- randomized evaluations
- school enrollment
- school finance
- school reform
