Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

685 items available

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/9388

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Educated Workers and Managers in the EU-27
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-03) Amin, Mohammad
This Brief highlights issues related to the education and skill level of workers and top managers in firms in 27 European Union countries (the EU-27), using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES). The exercise is an important step toward understanding the use of skilled and adequately educated workers and top managers by a firm and its likely effects. The Brief identifies several factors at the NUTS2 region level and firm level that are correlated with the difficulty firms face in obtaining adequately educated workers as well as the skill level and education level of the workers and top managers. Somewhat surprisingly, income per inhabitant in the NUTS2 regions is not a strong predictor of the use of skilled and educated workers and top managers or firms’ reported difficulty in finding adequately educated workers. Several firm performance measures, such as labor productivity, employment growth, exporting, research and development (R&D), and management quality, are found to be correlated with the use of skilled and educated workers and top managers. Some of these correlations differ sharply between low and high levels of the outcome variables. There is evidence that training provided to workers by the firms is associated with less dispersion of labor productivity between firms, and greater use of skilled workers is associated with less dispersion of wage rates across firms. Overall, the Brief finds that starting at low-income levels in EU regions, policy focus needs to shift more toward ensuring the availability of adequately educated workers than on reducing other obstacles as the economy develops. This shifting of policy focus can stabilize after the economy is sufficiently developed.
Education Finance Watch 2024: Key Findings about Education Financing
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-24) World Bank; UNESCO
The Education Finance Watch (EFW) is a collaborative effort between the World Bank, the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The EFW aims to provide an analysis of trends, patterns, and issues in education financing around the world.
100 Student Voices on AI and Education
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Cobo, C,; Munoz-Najar, A.; Bertrand, M.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the landscape of higher education (HE), presenting both opportunities and challenges. This paper discusses the results of focus group discussions conducted in 10 countries (Cameroon, Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Indonesia, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, and Rwanda), examining students’ perspectives, experiences, and concerns regarding AI’s impact on education.
AI Revolution in Education: What You Need to Know
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-01) Molina, E.; Cobo, C.; Pineda, J.; Rovner, H.
The AI revolution is transforming education at an unprecedented pace, offering opportunities to personalize learning experiences, support teachers, and optimize education management. This brief explores nine key AI-driven innovations in Latin America and the Caribbean, divided into solutions for teachers, students, and administration. For teachers, AI-powered mentors and feedback systems are improving teacher recruitment, retention, and professional development. AI-assisted lesson planning and automated administrative tasks are empowering educators to focus on teaching and mentoring students. Students benefit from AI-powered tutoring systems that adapt to their individual needs. The brief also examines the use of generative AI for assignments and the need to foster responsible AI use. In education administration, AI streamlines processes, identifies at-risk students, and optimizes resource allocation, such as matching teachers to vacancies and students to schools. Navigating the promise and challenges of AI requires addressing key issues like digital divide, ethical governance, and limited evidence on effectiveness at scale. AI should enhance human expertise, not replace it. Policymakers must proactively shape the responsible development of AI to create an inclusive, innovative future of learning for all.
Missing School - The Effect of Crises on Students and Teachers in Pakistan
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-03) Isa, Sana; D'Angelo, Sophia; Barón, Juan D.
Pakistani children have faced nationwide and severe disruptions to their schooling over the past several years, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then the 2022 floods. Given the country’s vulnerability to climate change, these disruptions are likely to increase. This note explores the government’s response to COVID-19 and school closures in Pakistan; it shows how data disaggregated by gender, household location, and other variables can inform a more effective and inclusive education response and build the education system’s resilience to future emergencies.
Delivering Education in the Midst of Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-22) World Bank
Ensuring a safe environment for children to learn is more than a mission for the WorldBank. It is an urgent imperative. In large part, the success of our FCV Strategy is predicated on education. There are few spheres of development with so much potential to contribute to violence prevention and peace building. Schooling, therefore, has a critical role in developing the social cohesion for stability, as well as the skill base needed for our client countries to advance in their development and achieve economic prosperity.
What Do You Want to Be?: Education and Work Aspirations Among the Ugandan Youth
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-01) Atamanov, Aziz; Cochinard, Frédéric; Ilukor, John; Kemigisha, Audrey; Mupere, Andrew ; Ponzini, Giulia
This brief discusses results from the survey of the youth population in Uganda using results from the Uganda High-Frequency Phone Survey (UHFPS). UHFPS has been collected by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) in collaboration with the World Bank since June 2020. The fourteenth round conducted in August-September 2023 included questions to capture education and career aspirations of the youth population aged 15-25.
Gender and Digital Development in Thailand
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-09-26) World Bank
The wave of digital transformation has swept across the globe, with its pace significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which expedited the adoption of digital technologies by several years. However, this rapid digital metamorphosis is not without the risk of escalating gender inequality. The digital divide, defined as "the distinction between those who have access to and can utilize digital communication services and those who are excluded from these services", exhibits a gendered aspect. This gender digital divide reflects the inequalities between men and women in terms of access to and usage of digital technology. This document offers an overview of the gender equality issues in digital development in Thailand, drawing on a literature review, initial findings from research conducted in Odon Thani province in 2022, and findings and recommendations from the 2023 Adult Skills Assessment in Thailand (ASAT).
Financing Basic Education: The Financial Implications of Zambia’s Education for All Policy
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-07-31) World Bank
Zambia introduced free and compulsory general education in 2011, but its implementation has been incomplete. In 2021, the government introduced the “Education for All” policy which abolished all formal and informal fees in general education (pre-primary, primary, and both lower and upper secondary levels), with fees replaced by compensatory increases in grants to schools. This note presents simulation results of the fiscal implications of the Education for All policy from 2022 to 2035. However, the introduction of measures to reduce costs and increase further the share of the budget allocated to education are likely to make the successful implementation of Education for All achievable. The note presents a range of cost-saving policies, similar to those employed by other countries to reduce costs during periods of rapid system expansion without negatively impacting learning. These include rationalized use of teachers’ housing, administrative offices, and laboratories and improved utilization of secondary school teachers. Implementing these policies, alongside the increases in education outlined in the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) would make the Education for All policy more affordable. However, our most expansive enrollment scenario would only be affordable if these cost-saving policies were coupled with further increases in education’s share of the government budget.
Assessment of Trends in General Education Public Expenditure in Zambia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-07-01) World Bank
Over the past decade, Zambia’s gross domestic product (GDP) has been decreasing as a result of a devastating combination of external and domestic shocks. The country’s macroeconomic environment was weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the worsening fiscal outlook, the need for better investments in human capital has never been greater. Building human capital is made more challenging because quality services need to cover a large proportion of the population. The main objective of this policy brief is to assess the funding of pre-primary to tertiary education and how effectively resources are utilized. The 2016 to 2021 period is used for review.