We’ve updated our 2022 working paper with Laura Moscoviz on long run trends in education quality with several new surveys from around the world. Notably, a new survey round for India (NFHS-5) casts doubt on earlier data (NFHS-3). Dropping the suspect data, India’s current learning levels are unchang...

Everyone agrees that Ghana's school feeding programme is an important and useful social programme…but insufficient and poor quality food is compromising its impacts; government financing remains a challenge; and it lacks lacks broader support and accountability mechanisms. The programme has huge pot...

In a new paper, we examine the connection between exposure to lead—a dangerous but prevalent neurotoxicant—and children’s learning outcomes. We find that lead poisoning alone could account for more than 20 percent of the learning gap between rich and poor countries. Given the comparative ease of, sa...

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...

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...

In the 2000s, cost-effectiveness analysis said it was a bad use of money to send antiretroviral drugs to low-income countries—drugs that ended up saving millions of lives.

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...