Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

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

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than 1 billion people, half of whom will be under 25 years old by 2050, is a diverse ...

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Tanzania: A Simple Teacher Incentive System Can Improve Learning
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12) World Bank
Tanzania devotes about one-fifth of government spending to education, focusing much of the funding on expanding school access. Primary school enrollment rates have surged, yet the quality of education services and learning outcomes remain poor, with only 38 percent of children aged 9–13 able to read or do arithmetic at the second grade level. Teachers play a critical role in helping children learn, but in Tanzania, many do not show up to teach. Poor motivation and lack of accountability have contributed to the high absenteeism and commensurate loss of instructional time. One way to strengthen teacher motivation and management is through performance pay. Teacher incentive schemes link bonuses or other rewards to specific targets, whether outputs (e.g., verified classroom presence) or outcomes (e.g., student test score improvement). Performance pay can help achieve learning results at low cost compared to teacher base salaries. In Tanzania, the Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund supported a randomized control trial comparing two types of teacher performance pay systems and their effect on early grade learning.
South Africa - Results-Based Financing and the Book Supply Chain: Motivating Writers and Publishers to Create Quality Storybooks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12) World Bank Group
Literacy serves as an essential building block for learning, so when children master reading, they are more likely to succeed in school generally. To support the South African government’s campaign to improve literacy rates and foster a love of reading among children, room to read implemented an initiative that included results-based elements to increase the availability of affordable, quality storybooks in African languages. The project brought together public and private sector players in the book supply chain to develop new national standards on storybooks and translations, and helped to identify and build capacity of smaller publishers and writers to publish African-language storybooks. In doing so, the project demonstrated how results-based financing can be effective in the production and procurement stages of the book chain in South Africa. Results-based financing motivated and engaged publishers and writers to participate and stay engaged in the two-year project, which armed them with the skills and knowledge they need to continue to create and publish quality storybooks on their own. The success of the South Africa project underscores the potential of using innovative models such as pooled procurement, open licensing, and one day one book workshops along with results-based financing to increase the availability of quality children’s books in a cost-efficient manner. By strengthening the book chain, the project ultimately helped to foster children’s love of reading and helped them to become better learners.
Zanzibar: Can Goal-setting and Incentives Improve Student Performance?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02) World Bank
The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured how two different incentive approaches affected the academic performance of grade 9 students in Zanzibar (Tanzania). The first approach allowed students to set personal goals at the beginning of the school year regarding their performance by the end of the year. The second approach combined this goal-setting exercise with non-financial rewards such as certificates or in-kind prizes for students who met their goals. These approaches were designed to answer the following questions: (i) whether students setting goals for themselves has any effect on their performance in school and (ii) whether this effect is strengthened when combined with non-financial incentives.
Cameroon - Can School Grants and Teacher Incentives be Used to Increase School Access and Improve Quality?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02) World Bank
The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded a feasibility study and a pre-pilot of performance-based school grants and teacher incentives among 20 rural primary schools in Cameroon. The purpose was to assess whether these RBF mechanisms could feasibly be used to improve transparency, financial management, and monitoring at the school level, increase community satisfaction, and draw lessons from the implementation of these RBF mechanisms to enable the initiative to be scaled up throughout Cameroon. While it is not possible to draw conclusions about the effect of this RBF program on education access or quality given the short time period and small sample size, this pre-pilot demonstrated that RBF is feasible in rural primary schools in Cameroon and highlighted the importance of several critical preconditions that must be in place for RBF to be effective. These preconditions include a simple and context-appropriate design, clear communication with key stakeholders, effective monitoring tools to assess school and teacher performance, and community involvement.
Tanzania - Can a Simple Teacher Incentive System Improve Learning?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) World Bank
The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank co-funded an evaluation that compared the effectiveness of two different teacher performance pay sys - tems in early primary schools in Tanzania. These performance pay systems are part of KiuFunza , an experimental teacher pay program introduced by Twaweza East-Africa, a civil society orga - nization, in collaboration with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Economic Development Initiatives (EDI).
Mozambique: Can Information and Incentives Increase School Attendance?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) World Bank
Although more children than ever are starting school in Africa, in many countries dropout rates remain high and few students complete their schooling, especially girls. Results-based financing (RBF) has been used in many developing countries to attempt to incentivize various stakeholders such as students, parents, and teachers to achieve better results. RBF mechanisms work by linking financial incentives to measurable results, for example school attendance, dropout rates, or student test scores. Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are one such RBF mechanism that has been used in many developing countries to incentivize individuals to take actions that they may not otherwise take, such as attending school or using preventive health services. CCTs work by giving individuals a cash transfer, conditional on verification that they have completed the prescribed behavior. CCTs have been shown to be effective in increasing school attendance in many countries, but their cost and complexity makes them difficult to manage for countries with limited administrative and budgetary capacity.
Systems in Action: Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11) World Bank
Education systems are large, complex organizations that encompass not only various sets of actors and inputs, but also the relationships that allow those actors and units to work together. When standards, rules, accountability relationships and financing levels are aligned towards shared education goals, the education system as a whole, in all its complexity and size, is coherent and able to perform well. Improving learning outcomes therefore requires much more than simply increasing resources; education systems must be strengthened at the component and the system level, to help equip children, youth and adults with knowledge and skills for life. The World Bank helps countries ensure ‘learning for all’ through support to countries on both the financing and knowledge fronts. The Education Global Practice within the World Bank champions a systems approach, by holistically evaluating which education policies and programs are most likely to create quality learning environments and improve student performance, especially among the disadvantaged and excluded.
Reforming Civil Service in Sierra Leone through Collective Leadership
(Washington, DC, 2014-06) World Bank
Improved capacity of the civil service in Sierra Leone is critical to deliver services for citizens. The government is tackling challenges of poor performance through a flagship public sector reform program (improving productivity through management and pay reforms), a part of which involves reform of the civil service. The World Bank is supporting the government on this civil service reform through a lending project on pay and performance. The project targets changes in three areas: (1) competitiveness in the pay of civil servants; (2) performance management and accountability of civil servants; and (3) recruiting and staffing to fill key positions. The World Bank leadership practice is supporting a collaborative leadership process to advance the pay and performance project results. They provided rapid results approach (RRA) coaching to approximately five inter-agency implementation teams to achieve the indicators set by the project, and facilitated discussions with the teams and the leadership team for the civil service reform agenda, in order to review progress and conduct problem-solving that will address implementation challenges.
Open Government Initiative in Edo State : Fostering an Ecosystem of Collaboration and Transparency
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05) Bujoreanu, Lyudmila; Kaplan, Jeff; McNaughton, Matthew
This note is intended to briefly describe the World Bank's experience supporting the development and implementation of an open government initiative in Nigeria's Edo State. It reflects upon the process of design and implementation of the first phase of the Edo State Open Government Initiative, which began in 2011 and sought to establish a broader framework for an Open Government ecosystem in the state. Phase 1 culminated with the launch of the Edo State Open Data Portal in September 2013, the first sub-national portal in Africa and which contains more than 100 data sets that had not been previously digitized or released to the public. Using this experience as a reference point, the note seeks to surface some lessons learned for effectively partnering with governments (both federal and state) on an open government agenda. At its core, open government is commonly perceived as being comprised of three main pillars: participation, transparency and collaboration. The World Bank's engagement with the Edo State Government in establishing of an Open Government Framework and moving open government ideas forward has resulted in a number of tangible outcomes and public goods. The Edo State Open Data Portal is now being reused by the developer's community and is providing citizens of Edo with free access to high-value, government data. As a result of the project, the government created two special units: a data digitalization unit and a GIS unit. The case of Edo presents a valuable knowledge sharing opportunity around creating an open government ecosystem and moving this agenda forward in a complex environment.