03. Journals
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These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.
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Publication
Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05)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
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)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
How Well Do Catholic and Other Faith-based Schools Serve the Poor? A Study with Special Reference to Africa: Part II -- Learning
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-02-06)This paper is the second in a set of two on the extent to which Catholic and other faith-based schools are serving the poor well. Catholic and other faith-based schools reach millions of children who live in poverty, yet this does not necessarily mean that they are serving these children well enough. The paper considers two separate issues. First, beyond academic subjects, Catholic and other faith-based schools emphasize learning related to values and religion. Do they succeed in doing so? Based on small sample survey data and qualitative fieldwork, as well as broader data on parental satisfaction with schools, the paper provides a tentative and mostly positive answer to this question, at least from the view of parents. The second issue is where performance is weaker. Education systems are affected by a learning crisis in the developing world. All schools should ensure that students learn, but too often this is not the case. The second part of the paper documents this learning crisis and the fact that Catholic and other faith-based schools are not immune to it. This is done in part through a rapid review of the recent World Development Report on education's promise, and a companion piece for sub-Saharan Africa. Estimates of performance for selected African countries are also provided. The results are sobering: too many children are not learning while in school. Finally, the paper briefly summarizes evidence from the literature on interventions that could improve learning, including in Catholic and faith-based schools. -
Publication
Education is Forbidden: The Effect of the Boko Haram Conflict on Education in North-East Nigeria
(Elsevier, 2019-11)This paper quantifies the impact of the Boko Haram conflict on various educational outcomes of individuals living in North-East Nigeria during the period 2009–2016. Using individual panel fixed-effects regressions and exploiting over-time and cross-village variation in conflict intensity, we show that conflict reduces school enrollment. The negative effect is larger for children who are no longer of mandatory school age. We do not find differential effects by gender, religion, or type of residential location. Additional results from a difference-in-differences estimation strategy indicate that conflict reduces the years of education completed. -
Publication
How Well Do Catholic and Other Faith-Based Schools Serve the Poor? A Study with Special Reference to Africa: Part I -- Schooling
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-02-22)Serving the poor is a prime component of the mission of Catholic and many other faith-based schools. Do the schools succeed in doing so? This paper and a companion paper focusing on learning aim to answer this question. In this paper, the focus is on schooling or enrolment in school. The paper considers first global and regional data on the number of students in Catholic preschools and nurseries, primary schools, and secondary schools. The data suggest that Catholic schools are located proportionately more in low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, having schools in low income countries does not guarantee that they serve disadvantaged children. Relying on household survey data from Africa, the second part of the analysis suggests that while Catholic and other faith-based schools reach many children in poverty, they often serve children from better off households proportionately more. The last part of the paper considers the constraints faced by Catholic and other faith-based schools in reaching the poor. Some constraints are shared with other types of schools, but others are peculiar to Catholic and faith-based schools, especially in terms of the funding from households that they need to operate given no or only limited state support. -
Publication
Financial Constraints and Girls’ Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-02)We assess the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by 55%. The share of older test takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the quantity and composition of students, we find robustly positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a setting where expanded access could strain limited resources and reduce school quality. Our findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in low-income countries like The Gambia. -
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Dynamics of Child Development: Analysis of a Longitudinal Cohort in a Very Low Income Country
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-02)Longitudinal patterns of child development and socioeconomic status are described for a cohort of children in Madagascar surveyed when 3–6 and 7–10 years old. Substantial wealth gradients were found across multiple domains: receptive vocabulary, cognition, sustained attention, and working memory. The results are robust to the inclusion of lagged outcomes, maternal endowments, measures of child health, and home stimulation. Wealth gradients are significant at ages 3–4, widen with age, and flatten out by ages 9–10. For vocabulary and sustained attention, the gradient grows steadily between ages three and six; for cognitive composite and memory of phrases, the gradient widens later (ages 7–8) before flattening out. These gaps in cognitive outcomes translate into equally sizeable gaps in learning outcomes. 12–18% of the predicted gap in early outcomes is accounted for by differences in home stimulation, even after controlling for maternal education and endowments. -
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Regulating Market Entry of Low-Cost Private Schools in Sub-Saharan Africa: Towards a Theory of Private Education Regulation
(Elsevier, 2018-05)This study provides a comparative assessment of policies governing private schools in twenty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Findings suggest that current regulatory systems are failing to adequately address the negative externalities and failures of private schooling markets. Insufficient capacity on the part of governments is a contributor to uneven policy implementation and creates opportunities for rent-seeking and corruption. Onerous market entry regulations offer constraints on the growth of official private education markets, but facilitate growth in unofficial markets if demand for education is not being fully met by the supply of government service provision, restricting the government’s ability to provide adequate oversight of private providers. -
Publication
Performance of Primary Education in Burkina Faso: A Multi-Output Stochastic Frontier Analysis
(Taylor and Francis, 2018)Primary education plays an important role in the development of human capital in developing countries. Consequently, Burkina Faso has taken steps to ensure both access to, and better quality of, primary education. However, comparisons between the different provinces of Burkina Faso reveal that there is a greater disparity between provinces in terms of access to, and the quality of, education, than there is in the provision of resources. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the efficiency of the resources used in providing primary education in Burkina Faso. We apply a stochastic frontier model in order to estimate the efficiency with which the 45 provinces of Burkina Faso provide primary education. The proposed model not only allows two outputs for primary education to be included, but also provides for an assessment of the factors that may affect inefficiency. Our results indicate that, overall, the primary education system in Burkina Faso operates at an efficiency level of approximately 63%. In addition, the living conditions of the population, as well as some factors internal to the education system, appear to have a relationship with the efficiency of primary education in the various provinces of Burkina Faso. -
Publication
Inequality of Educational Opportunity: The Relationship between Access, Affordability, and Quality of Private Schools in Lagos, Nigeria
(Taylor and Francis, 2018)Using data from a census of private schools in one of Lagos, Nigeria’s administrative jurisdictions, this paper explores the linkages between a heterogeneous sector of private schools and issues of school access, affordability, quality, and ultimately social mobility for households at the bottom of the income distribution. Although a large private education market has buoyed Lagos’s growth towards near-universal primary enrolment, this heterogeneous school sector appears to be providing socially stratifying paths towards educational attainment. We apply Lucas’s theory of effectively maintained inequality to assess the extent to which access to higher quality education services within the private sector is determined by cost. We find that higher-cost private schools provide students with greater opportunities to study in institutions with higher quality inputs and increased potential for progression within the educational system. As such, it is highly likely that these schools are primarily accessible to students at the upper ends of the income distribution.