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Asim, Salman

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Last updated: July 17, 2024
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Salman Asim is a senior economist in the Education Global Practice at the World Bank, currently leading the World Bank’s engagement on technology and innovation in K-12 education, adult learning systems for 21st-century skills, and labor market transitions in response to green technologies and automation (artificial intelligence/digital) for education programs in China, the Republic of Korea, and Mongolia. Previously, he led the World Bank’s operations on systemwide basic education reforms in Ethiopia and Malawi, delivering US$250 million in International Development Association and Global Partnership for Education investments in these countries. He further co-led the design and implementation for the Education Program for Results (US$200 million) and led analytical products in Tanzania. He has also worked on education programs in South Asia and on several impact evaluations in the Development Economics Research Group. He has published in peer-reviewed journals. Asim recently led the large-scale Malawi Longitudinal School Survey with US$5 million in external research grants. His work in Malawi won the Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on People of African Descent from the Comparative and International Education Society. Asim is a Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford.

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    What Matters for Learning in Malawi? Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-10) Asim, Salman; Casley Gera, Ravinder
    Since the introduction of free primary education in 1994, Malawi has achieved rapid expansion in access to school, but the resulting rapid growth in enrollments have outstripped the increase in resources and capacity of the system to deliver learning. The result is an education system with widespread overcrowding and large disparities in conditions, access, and learning outcomes between schools. "What Matters for Learning in Malawi? Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey" presents one of the most comprehensive pictures ever presented of conditions, practices, and learning outcomes in a low-income country. Using data from a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of more than 500 schools; 4,000 teachers; and a gender-balanced, random sample of more than 13,000 grade 4 students, this book presents a robust analysis of the school-, teacher-, and student-level characteristics that prevent students from learning. The analysis reveals a strong relationship between the remoteness of a school’s location and inequities in school conditions, including the availability and condition of infrastructure, teaching and learning materials, finance, staffing, and supervision. Large class sizes limit the effectiveness of even skilled and highly motivated teachers. Poor learning outcomes are also evident in schools with high proportions of students who have illiterate parents; speak minority languages; are older than the typical age for their grade; and, particularly, have a poor mindset. A dedicated chapter focused on girls’ learning shows that student-level characteristics account for the majority of variation in learning outcomes; of those characteristics, gender is associated with the biggest inequities. The book introduces a new Disadvantage Index (DI) as tool to understand the ways in which multiple dimensions of disadvantage at the school level interact, and it models the impact of investing in low-cost classrooms and additional lower primary teachers at the most disadvantaged schools. What Matters for Learning in Malawi? will be of interest to researchers, educators, and policy makers who have an interest in improving learning outcomes in low-income countries and populations.
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    Does Effective School Leadership Improve Student Progression and Test Scores? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Malawi
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-17) Asim, Salman; Gera, Ravinder Casley; Harris, Donna; Dercon, Stefan
    Evidence from high-income countries suggests that the quality of school leadership has measurable impacts on teacher behaviors and student learning achievement. However, there is a lack of rigorous evidence in low-income contexts, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study tests the impact on student progression and test scores of a two-year, multi-phase intervention to strengthen leadership skills for head teachers, deputy head teachers, and sub-district education officials. The intervention consists of two phases of classroom training along with follow-up visits, implemented over two years. It focuses on skills related to making more efficient use of resources; motivating and incentivizing teachers to improve performance; and curating a culture in which students and teachers are all motivated to strengthen learning. A randomized controlled trial was conducted in 1,198 schools in all districts of Malawi, providing evidence of the impact of the intervention at scale. The findings show that the intervention improved student test scores by 0.1 standard deviations, equivalent to around eight weeks of additional learning, as well as improving progression rates. The outcomes were achieved primarily as a result of improvements in the provision of remedial classes.
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    Are Short-Term Gains in Learning Outcomes Possible? Evidence from the Malawi Education Sector Improvement Project
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-17) Asim, Salman; Gera, Ravinder Casley
    This paper presents evidence of the impact of a five-year package of interconnected interventions intended to improve learning environments in eight disadvantaged districts in Malawi. The intervention, which was implemented over five years, provided additional finance to schools to support the hiring of additional teachers and construction of learning shelters to improve class sizes in lower primary, along with constructing classrooms and providing results-based finance to reward improvements in staffing. The interventions were targeted to eight districts with longstanding disadvantages in staffing, learning environments, and learning outcomes, particularly for girls. Employing administrative data and data from a nationally representative independent sample of public primary schools, the analysis finds that these investments closed the gap in learning outcomes between the targeted districts and the rest of Malawi. There is also suggestive evidence that the program reduced learning gaps between girls and boys. The findings suggest that even in a low-income environment with significant constraints, targeted efforts to reduce class sizes can close district-level gaps in learning.
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    Learning Loss as a Result of COVID-19: Evidence from a Longitudinal Survey in Malawi
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-16) Asim, Salman; Bashir, Sajitha; Gera, Ravinder Casley
    School closures from COVID-19 have resulted in large learning losses, from 0.05 to 0.17 standard deviations in high income countries, equivalent to two to six months of lost learning. However, the extent of primary-level learning loss in low-income countries remains unclear, studies lack information on individual students’ learning trajectories, and most do not include students who dropped out. This paper uses representative survey data from Malawi that includes unique longitudinal data on individual students (grade 4 at baseline), including those who dropped out, at three points in time: pre-COVID; 1–12 months before the seven-month school closures; and 14–20 months after schools reopened. Across math, English, and Chichewa, the local language, the average learning loss amounts to 18 months (78 points, 0.78 standard deviations), significantly higher than the loss documented in high income contexts. Decomposing this loss, the findings show that students lost 0.25 standard deviations of existing knowledge during the closure, and a further 0.23 standard deviations in foregone learning compared to the expected trajectory had schools remained open. Further loss comes from a slowdown in learning after schools reopened, with students gaining 7 points’ less new knowledge in math per 100 days, the majority of which is not explained by increased dropout. Our findings are relevant for other low-income and lower-middle income contexts: remote learning during school closure was in general ineffectual, necessitating urgent action to remediate lost learning; and children who dropped out had the highest learning losses and now require out-of-school learning opportunities.
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    Can Targeted Allocation of Teachers Improve Student Learning Outcomes? Evidence from Malawi
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-16) Asim, Salman; Gera, Ravinder Casley; Moreno, Martin; Wong, Kerry
    Teachers are one of the most important inputs for learning, but in many low-income countries they are poorly distributed between schools. This paper discusses the case of Malawi, which has introduced new evidence-based policies and procedures to improve the equity and efficiency of the allocation of teachers to schools. The analysis finds that adherence to these policies has been highly variable between the country’s districts, with the most successful deploying 75 percent of teachers according to the rules and the least successful just 22 percent. Using administrative data, the paper identifies the impacts on student repetition rates of reductions in pupil–qualified teacher ratios as a result of the new teachers. The findings show that schools that moved from having more than 90 pupils per qualified teacher to a lower ratio experienced reductions in lower primary school repetition rates of 2–3 percentage points. However, similar impacts on dropout are not observed.