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Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
The global debate around high-stakes exams is strongly influenced by research from high-income countries. That research emphasises who gets sorted into the “best” schools. An alternative perspective that hasn’t received enough attention takes exams as artificial bottlenecks that prevent many childre...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
UNESCO tells us that only one in seven low- and middle-income countries knows how much learning has been lost due to COVID school closures. Where there has been no measurement, simulations of learning loss are beginning to take the place of empirical facts. Yet countries examine millions of kids eac...
Blog Post
June 20, 2023
This is the third of our biennial updates on global education aid finance. In these posts we examine aid data from the OECD, analysing how much aid is going to education, where it is allocated, by who, and through what channels. The latest available data, which we use for this analysis, is from 2021...
Blog Post
June 13, 2023
School feeding is one of those social policy interventions that are hard to pigeonhole in traditional sectors. The benefits span various facets of the beneficiaries’ lives and the local economy. So who should bear the responsibility and cost of provision of school meals? Despite strong political and...
Blog Post
April 25, 2023
Much ink has been spilled over the impact of borrowing country institutions and the policies and practices of donor organizations on aid effectiveness. But what do we know about the role of those individuals who often represent the key interface between country-level institutions and donor-funded pr...
Blog Post
February 10, 2023
Although African governments that deliver higher rates of primary enrollment enjoy greater approval ratings, the relative importance of access is likely to decline as countries approach universal primary education. That is already reflected in the prominence of learning outcomes as a predictor of ci...