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WORKING PAPERS
October 19, 2022
To contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in Kenya, as in many other countries, had to temporarily close. This study investigates the extent to which lockdowns and school closures affected households and low-cost private schools (LCPS) in four urban informal settlements in Nairobi. Qua...
WORKING PAPERS
June 09, 2022
Does channeling government-to-person (G2P) payments through bank accounts encourage financial inclusion and use? This paper explores the factors that have driven the adoption of digital payments in India by beneficiaries of PMGKY, the large-scale COVID-19 relief program launched in May 2020.
WORKING PAPERS
April 21, 2022
Education is one of the most important public goods provided by modern governments. Yet governments worldwide seldom perform well in the sector. This raises the question: Why do governments preside over poor education quality? This paper answers this question with evidence from Tanzania.
WORKING PAPERS
February 23, 2022
We use comparable, survey-based literacy tests for repeated cross-sections of men and women born between 1950 and 2000 to study education outcomes across cohorts in 87 countries. We find that education quality, defined as literacy conditional on completing five years of schooling, stagnated or decli...
WORKING PAPERS
November 30, 2021
Foreign aid donors and international organizations supporting education in developing countries have increasingly coalesced around a policy agenda prioritizing foundational learning, measured by test scores in primary school, based on a diagnosis of deficient school quality, and a growing body of em...
WORKING PAPERS
September 27, 2019
Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly varying re...
WORKING PAPERS
June 27, 2019
The state of Andhra Pradesh is recognized as a leader in using technology to improve the delivery of public services, programs and subsidies. This paper reports on research to better understand the functioning and effectiveness of its reforms to strengthen state capacity by digitalizing service deli...
WORKING PAPERS
July 10, 2018
India is at the forefront of the use of digital technology to transform the way in which citizens interact with states. This paper provides a picture of the perceived impact of digitization reforms in Rajasthan, based on a survey of beneficiaries of several benefit programs. We find that, on balance...
WORKING PAPERS
May 09, 2017
Peru is a remarkable example of a country that established civil identification as a national priority in response to the need to re-integrate the state after a serious insurgency. The approach has combined the creation of an autonomous civil registration and identification agency and the use of per...
WORKING PAPERS
January 08, 2013
This paper surveys 160 cases where biometric identification has been used for economic, political, and social purposes in developing countries. One primary conclusion is that identification should be considered as a component of development policy, rather than being seen as just a cost on a program-...