Early childhood is a crucial period for the cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and language development of children. Of the 200 million children who do not reach their developmental potential worldwide, 66 percent live in South Asia. This paper explores gaps in knowledge among educators in...

This paper reports the results of an at-scale randomized controlled trial among 18,000 secondary students in Zanzibar (Tanzania) to examine the effects of personal best goal-setting on student outcomes. The paper also tests the impact of combining goal setting with non-financial rewards...

Teacher effectiveness is low in many developing countries. How can it be improved? We show that understanding teacher beliefs may be an important but overlooked part of the puzzle. Our review of recent evidence shows that teacher beliefs can impact student outcomes directly; they can also...

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a significantly smaller scale of...

Do women weather economic shocks differently than men? The evidence shows this to be the case, especially in low-income countries. The first-round impacts of economic crises on women's employment should be particularly salient in the current downturn, since women have increased their...

This study evaluates the impacts of low-cost, performance-based incentives in Tanzanian secondary schools. Results from a two-phase randomized trial show that incentives for teachers led to modest average improvements in student achievement across different subjects. Further, withdrawing...

This paper discusses the potential role of low-cost private secondary schools in Tanzania. The share of private enrollment has been negatively correlated with the availability of public schools. With the 2016 Fee-Free Basic Education Policy, the public secondary education system is experiencing...

Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been...

The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses-the average number of years of schooling in a population-is based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns out to be a major omission. As recent research shows, students in different countries who...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a severe blow to human capital. This report presents new evidence and analysis to provide a comprehensive diagnostic of the effects of the pandemic on human capital outcomes and identify promising policy responses for governments faced with the task of rebuilding...