Journal articles published externally

2,071 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • 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
    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
    Are New Secondary Schools Built Where They Are Needed Most in Uganda? Comparing Catholic with Public and Other Private Schools
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-06-16) Wodon, Quentin
    Low income countries in sub-Saharan Africa are confronted with a major challenge in terms of expanding access to secondary education. This is also the case in Uganda. This article considers two questions. First, where should new secondary schools be built if the aim is to reduce geographic disparities in access? Second, have new schools, and in particular faith-based schools, been built in the areas that need schools the most? The analysis considers Catholic as well as public and other private schools. Results suggest that new schools are often not located in the areas that need them the most.
  • 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
    As Good as the Networks They Keep?: Improving Outcomes through Weak Ties in Rural Uganda
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2018-04) Vasilaky, Kathryn N.; Leonard, Kenneth L.
    We examine an intervention randomized at the village level in which female farmers invited to a single training session were randomly paired with farmers whom they did not know and encouraged to share new agricultural information throughout the growing season for a recently adopted cash crop. We show that the intervention signi ficantly increased the productivity of all farmers except of those who were already in the highest quintile of productivity, and that there were signifi cant spillovers in productivity to male farmers.
  • Publication
    Competition or Cooperation?: Using Team and Tournament Incentives for Learning among Female Farmers in Rural Uganda
    (Elsevier, 2018-03) Vasilaky, Kathryn N.; Islam, Asif M.
    This study explores the behavioral learning characteristics of smallholder female farmers in Uganda by quantifying the amount of information learned under different incentive schemes. The paper shows how competitive versus team incentives compare in motivating Ugandan farmers to learn and share information relevant to adopting a new agricultural technology. We find that tournament-based incentives provide greater outcomes in terms of total information learned than threshold-based team incentives. Furthermore the order of the incentive – whether the tournament precedes or follows the team incentive scheme – does not affect the volume of information learned. New information introduced between rounds was learned by more individuals under team incentives than under tournament incentives. The study provides direct practical policy recommendations for improving learning in the context of agriculture in Uganda.
  • Publication
    Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
    (Elsevier, 2017-10) Serneels, Pieter; Beegle, Kathleen; Dillon, Andrew
    Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether the estimates of Mincerian returns depend on how information about wage work is collected. Relying on a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper finds that estimates of the returns to education vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent. The differences derived from questionnaire type are substantial, varying from higher returns of 5 percentage points among the most well educated men to 16 percentage points among the least well educated women. These differences are at magnitudes similar to the bias in ordinary least squares estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings demonstrate that survey design matters in the estimation of returns to schooling and that care is needed in comparing across contexts and over time, particularly if the data are generated through different surveys.
  • Publication
    Training Funds and the Incidence of Training : The Case of Mauritius
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015-02-24) Kuku, Oluyemisi; Orazem, Peter F.; Rojid, Sawkut; Vodopivec, Milan
    Training funds are used to incentivize training in developing countries, but the funds are based on payroll taxes that lower the return to training. In the absence of training funds, larger, high-wage and more capital-intensive firms are the most likely to offer training unless they are liquidity constrained. If firms are not liquidity constrained, the fund could lower training investments. Using an administrative data set on the Mauritius training fund, we find that the firms most likely to train pay more in taxes than they gain in subsidies. The smallest firms receive more benefits than they pay in taxes.
  • Publication
    Monitoring and Evaluating the Impact of National School-Based Deworming in Kenya: Study Design and Baseline Results
    (BioMed Central, 2013-07-05) Mwandawiro, Charles S.; Nikolay, Birgit; Kihara, Jimmy H.; Ozier, Owen; Mukoko, Dunstan A.; Mwanje, Mariam T.; Hakobyan, Anna; Pullan, Rachel L.; Brooker, Simon J.; Njenga, Sammy M.
    An increasing number of countries in Africa and elsewhere are developing national plans for the control of neglected tropical diseases. A key component of such plans is school-based deworming (SBD) for the control of soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) and schistosomiasis. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of national programs is essential to ensure they are achieving their stated aims and to evaluate when to reduce the frequency of treatment or when to halt it altogether. The article describes the M&E design of the Kenya national SBD program and presents results from the baseline survey conducted in early 2012.