Person:
Blimpo, Moussa
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Economics of Education,
Public Economics,
Energy Economics,
Electricity Access,
Human Capital
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Office of the Regional Chief Economist, Africa, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
March 13, 2023
Biography
Moussa P. Blimpo is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for the Africa Region (AFRCE) of the World Bank. Prior to this, he was an assistant professor of economics and international studies at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests cover a range of policy-relevant questions concerning African economies. His recent research and publications address issues of electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa, the role of disruptive technologies on the prospects of African economies to leapfrog and address key development challenges, and human capital acquisition in African countries. He holds a PhD in economics from New York University and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He founded, and led between 2011 and 2015, the Center for Research and Opinion Polls (CROP), a think tank based in Togo.
Publication Search Results
1 - 5 of 5
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Publication
Parental Human Capital and Effective School Management: Evidence from The Gambia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)Education systems in developing countries are often centrally managed in a top-down structure. In environments where schools have different needs and where localized information plays an important role, empowerment of the local community may be attractive, but low levels of human capital at the local level may offset gains from local information. This paper reports the results of a four-year, large-scale experiment that provided a grant and comprehensive school management training to principals, teachers, and community representatives in a set of schools. To separate the effect of the training from the grant, a second set of schools received the grant only with no training. A third set of schools served as a control group and received neither intervention. Each of 273 Gambian primary schools were randomized to one of the three groups. The program was implemented through the government education system. Three to four years into the program, the full intervention led to a 21 percent reduction in student absenteeism and a 23 percent reduction in teacher absenteeism, but produced no impact on student test scores. The effect of the full program on learning outcomes is strongly mediated by baseline local capacity, as measured by adult literacy. This result suggests that, in villages with high literacy, the program may yield gains on students learning outcomes. Receiving the grant alone had no impact on either test scores or student participation. -
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. -
Publication
Technology in the Classroom and Learning in Secondary Schools
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)This paper studies the impact of a computer-assisted learning program on learning outcomes among high school students in The Gambia. The program uses innovative technologies and teaching approach to facilitate the teaching of mathematics and science. Since the pilot schools were not randomly chosen, the study first used administrative and survey data, including a written test, to build a credible counterfactual of comparable groups of control students. It used these data to conduct a pre-analysis plan prior to students taking the high-stakes certification exam. The study later used the certification exam data on the same students to replicate the results. The findings show that the program led to a 0.59 standard deviation gains in mathematics scores and an increase of 15 percentage points (a threefold increase) in the share of students who obtained credit in mathematics and English, a criterion for college admission in The Gambia. The impact is concentrated among high-achieving students at the baseline, irrespective of their gender or socioeconomic background. -
Publication
Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02)Early childhood experiences lay the foundation for outcomes later in life. Policy makers in developing countries face a dual challenge of promoting access to and quality of early childhood development services, but evidence on how to manage this trade-off is scarce. This paper studies two experiments of early childhood development programs in The Gambia: one increasing access to services, and another improving service quality. In the first experiment, new community-based early childhood development centers were introduced to randomly chosen villages that had no preexisting, structured early childhood development services. In the second experiment, a randomly assigned subset of existing early childhood development centers received intensive provider training. The analysis finds no evidence that either intervention improved average levels of child development. Exploratory analysis suggests that the first experiment, which increased access to relatively low-quality early childhood development services, led to declines in child development among children from less disadvantaged households. The evidence supports that these households may have been steered away from better quality early childhood settings in their homes. Comparisons of observationally similar children across experiments reveal that existing early childhood development centers increased language skills by 0.4 standard deviation relative to the community-based alternative, reflecting differences in program quality. -
Publication
Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-12)This study analyzes 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 percent. 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, there are 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. The 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.