Journal articles published externally

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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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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Now showing 1 - 10 of 51
  • Publication
    Koranic Schools in Niger: How Much Can Be Learned from Existing Data?
    (Taylor and Francis, 2022-01-28) Male, Chata; Nayihouba, Ada; Wodon, Quentin
    The term Koranic school is often used to describe schools that are not part of the formal education system and typically place a strong emphasis on memorizing the Koran in Arabic, as well as on knowledge of Islamic religious education and practice. Using data from Niger as a case study, this paper provides data on trends in the share of individuals that have a Koranic education, a formal education, or no education at all, as well as a basic profile (univariate and multivariate) of children with Koranic education, formal education, or no education at all. In addition, the potential impacts of Koranic education in comparison to formal education or no education at all on outcomes such as literacy and numeracy, labor market earnings, household consumption, assets and perceptions of well-being, and infant mortality is analyzed.
  • Publication
    Teacher Satisfaction and Its Determinants: Analysis Based on Data from Nigeria and Uganda
    (Taylor and Francis, 2022-01-28) Nkengne, Patrick; Pieume, Olivier; Tsimpo, Clarence; Ezeugwu, Gilbert; Wodon, Quentin
    Teachers who are satisfied with their job are more likely to teach well, which in turn should enable their students to better learn while in school. Sub-Saharan Africa is currently experiencing a learning crisis, with close to nine out of ten children not able to read and understand a simple text at age 10. This affects all types of schools and students, including students in Catholic and other faith-based schools. Improving working conditions and job satisfaction among teachers is part of the answer to this learning crisis. After a brief discussion of data for Nigeria, this article looks at the level of satisfaction of teachers in Uganda, its determinants, and its impact on the quality teaching. Specifically, four questions are asked: What is the level of teacher job satisfaction in Uganda? How does job satisfaction relate to the characteristics of teachers? What is the impact of teachers’ satisfaction on their performance, as it can be measured through various variables of teacher effort? Finally, what are the main factors affecting satisfaction according to teachers? The answers to these questions have implications for policy and practice in faith-based as well as in other schools.
  • Publication
    Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05) Allmang, Skye; Rozhenkova, Veronika; Khakshi, James Ward; Raza, Wameq; Heymann, Jody
    Empirical data on the aspirations of young women and girls in post-conflict settings are scarce. This article analyses the factors associated with the educational and career aspirations of 2,473 young women and girls in Sierra Leone. Findings indicated that over three-quarters of our sample aspired to continue their studies up to the university level, and two-thirds aspired to obtain a formal sector job requiring an education. These findings are important for discussions of aid which can accelerate economic advances and opportunities within advanced economies for both women and men.
  • Publication
    Assessing Gender Gaps in Employment and Earnings in Africa: The Case of Eswatini
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-07) Brixiova Schwidrowski, Zuzana; Imai, Susumu; Kangoye, Thierry; Yameogo, Nadege Desiree
    Persistent gender gaps characterize labor markets in many African countries. Utilizing Eswatini’s first three labor market surveys (conducted in 2007, 2010, and 2013), this paper provides first systematic evidence on the country’s gender gaps in employment and earnings. We find that women have notably lower employment rates and earnings than men, even though the global financial crisis had a less negative impact on women than it had on men. Both unadjusted and unexplained gender earnings gaps are higher in self-employment than in wage employment. Tertiary education and urban location account for a large part of the gender earnings gap and mitigate high female propensity to self-employment. Our findings suggest that policies supporting female higher education and rural-urban mobility could reduce persistent inequalities in Eswatini’s labor market outcomes as well as in other middle-income countries in southern Africa.
  • Publication
    Cognitive Achievement Production in Madagascar: A Value-Added Model Approach
    (Taylor and Francis, 2021-06-19) Aubery, Frederic; Sahn, David
    In this paper, we measure the contribution of an additional year of schooling on skills acquisition for a cohort of young adults in Madagascar. We estimate a value-added model of learning achievement that includes test scores measured at adolescence, thereby reducing the potential for omitted variable bias. We demonstrate that schooling increases cognitive skills among young adults. The value-added of a year of schooling during adolescence is 0.15 to 0.26 standard deviation. Our results show the skills gap widens in adolescence, as students with higher cognitive skills complete more grades, accumulating more skills in their transition to adulthood.
  • Publication
    Rural Roads, Poverty, and Resilience: Evidence from Ethiopia
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-10) Nakamura, Shohei; Bundervoet, Tom; Nuru, Mohammed
    This study analyses the linkage between the recent rural road development and household welfare, resilience, and economic conditions in Ethiopia. The empirical approach relies on a difference-in-differences matching method, taking advantage of a nationally representative household survey and an original road database, both of which are panel data spanning the period 2012–2016. The results of the econometric analysis suggest that Ethiopia’s rural road development was associated with a significant increase in household welfare or significant smaller losses in household consumption during the severe droughts. In addition, rural roads in very remote areas were associated with farmers’ sales of a larger share of their harvests and higher chance of fertiliser use. Rural road development was also associated with a higher likelihood of earning income from wage employment, particularly for women and youth. Taken together, the results suggest that, by connecting remote communities to markets and the main road network, rural roads have substantially supported the welfare and resilience of rural households in shock-prone Ethiopia.
  • Publication
    Quality of Clinical Assessment and Child Mortality: A Three-Country Cross-Sectional Study
    (Oxford University Press, 2020-06) Perales, Nicole A.; Wei, Dorothy; Khadka, Aayush; Leslie, Hannah H.; Hamadou, Saidou; Chamberlin Yama, Gervais; Robyn, Paul Jacob; Shapira, Gil; Kruk, Margaret E.; Fink, Gunther
    This analysis describes specific gaps in the quality of health care in Central Africa and assesses the association between quality of clinical care and mortality at age 2–59 months. Regionally representative facility and household surveys for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon and Central African Republic were collected between 2012 and 2016. These data are novel in linking facilities with households in their catchment area. Compliance with diagnostic and danger sign protocols during sick-child visits was observed by trained assessors. We computed facility- and district-level compliance indicators for patients aged 2–59 months and used multivariate multi-level logistic regression models to estimate the association between clinical assessment quality and mortality at age 2–59 months in the catchment areas of the observed facilities. A total of 13 618 live births were analysed and 1818 sick-child visits were directly observed and used to rate 643 facilities. Eight percent of observed visits complied with 80% of basic diagnostic protocols, and 13% of visits fully adhered to select general danger sign protocols. A 10% greater compliance with diagnostic protocols was associated with a 14.1% (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 95% CI: 0.025–0.244) reduction in the odds of mortality at age 2–59 months; a 10% greater compliance with select general danger sign protocols was associated with a 15.3% (aOR 95% CI: 0.058–0.237) reduction in the same odds. The results of this article suggest that compliance with recommended clinical protocols remains poor in many settings and improvements in mortality at age 2–59 months could be possible if compliance were improved.
  • Publication
    Games as Boundary Objects: Charting Trade-offs in Sustainable Livestock Transformation
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-03-27) Morris, Joanne; Ensor, Jonathan E.; Pfeifer, Catherine; Marchant, Robert; Mulatu, Dawit W.; Soka, Geofrey; Ouedraogo-Kone, Salifou; Wakeyo, Mekonnen B.; Topi, Corrado
    Attempts to structurally transform segments of the agri-food system inevitably involve trade-offs between the priorities of actors with different incentives, perspectives and values. Trade-offs are context-specific, reflecting different socio-economic and political realities. We investigate the potential of structured boundary objects to facilitate exposing and reconciling these trade-offs within the context of multi-stakeholder social learning processes with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Building on boundary objects as items flexible enough to be understood by all without having one common definition, structured boundary objects visualize actors’ input in a comparable format to facilitate knowledge sharing. Stakeholders in each country used a simulation tool and board game to explore the implications of changing livestock stocking and management practices for the environment and for actors’ future socio-economic priorities. Using structured boundary objects elicited trade-offs between household food and animal feed, and between livestock for income, labor, and/ or cultural functions, reflecting the context-specific and subjective evaluations actors make when attempting to plan livelihood changes. Our findings suggest to policy and decision-makers that sustainable transition plans can be developed when stakeholders in local agri-food systems employ approaches that allow shared understandings of trade-offs inherent to sustainable agriculture to emerge.
  • Publication
    Enhancing Young Children’s Language Acquisition through Parent–Child Book-Sharing: A Randomized Trial in Rural Kenya
    (Elsevier, 2020-01) Knauer, Heather A.; Jakiela, Pamela; Ozier, Owen; Aboud, Frances; Fernald, Lia C.H.
    Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43%) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support programs have shown significant benefits for children’s development, but the programs are often expensive and resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The intervention was a modified dialogic reading training program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate books adapted for a low-literacy population. We used a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n?=?357) and their 24- to 83-month-old children (n?=?510) in rural Kenya. The first treatment group received storybooks, while the other treatment arms received storybooks paired with varying quantities of modified dialogic reading training for parents. Main effects of each arm of the trial were examined, and tests of heterogeneity were conducted to examine differential effects among children of illiterate vs. literate caregivers. Parent training paired with the provision of culturally appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions among preschool-aged children. Treatments involving training improved storybook-specific expressive vocabulary. The children of illiterate caregivers benefited at least as much as the children of literate caregivers. For some outcomes, effects were comparable; for other outcomes, there were differentially larger effects for children of illiterate caregivers.
  • Publication
    How to Target Households in Adaptive Social Protection Systems? Evidence from Humanitarian and Development Approaches in Niger
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019-12-06) Schnitzer, Pascale
    The methods used to identify the beneficiaries of programs aiming to address persistent poverty and shocks are subject to frequent policy debates. Relying on panel data from Niger, this report simulates the performance of various targeting methods that are widely used by development and humanitarian actors. The methods include proxy-means testing (PMT), household economy analysis (HEA), geographical targeting, and combined methods. Results show that PMT performs more effectively in identifying persistently poor households, while HEA shows superior performance in identifying transiently food insecure households. Geographical targeting is particularly efficient in responding to food crises, which tend to be largely covariate. Combinations of geographical, PMT, and HEA approaches may be used as part of an efficient and scalable adaptive social protection system. Results motivate the consolidation of data across programs, which can support the application of alternative targeting methods tailored to program-specific objectives.