Person:
Hasan, Amer
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Early childhood development,
Education,
Impact evaluation
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Education Global Practice, South Asia Region
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Amer Hasan is a Senior Economist with the Education Global Practice, focusing on the South Asia Region (SAR). His most recent assignment before this was with the Human Capital Project team. He has also been a part of the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) Education team where he worked on Indonesia and China and served as Task Team Leader on both lending and analytical operations. He was the EAP regional focal point for Early Childhood as well as for Disability Inclusive Education. He co-led the 2018 flagship report on the quality of education in EAP entitled “Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific.” Amer holds a PhD and Masters in Public Policy from the University of Chicago as well as a BA in History from Yale University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
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Publication
Learning Losses in Pakistan Due to COVID-19 School Closures: A Technical Note on Simulation Results
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10)Pakistan was among the first countries in the world to institute widespread school closures as a result of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). What are the expected levels of learning that teachers will have to deal with in the class? Will children have lost learning while schools were closed? What should teachers, parents, and children expect from the first few weeks of schooling? How can parents, teachers, and the school system as a whole help children catch up? While school closures have been effective in supporting efforts at social distancing, they may well have serious consequences for schooling and learning. This note presents results from a series of simulations that aim to capture the impacts that school closures in Pakistan may have on the learning levels, enrollment, and future earnings of children and students. In this note, the authors present an overview of how these numbers are calculated and how to interpret them. This note draws on a simulation exercise for all countries on which data is available, including Pakistan, conducted by researchers at the World Bank. -
Publication
Remote Learning During COVID-19: Lessons from Today, Principles for Tomorrow
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-30)School closures during COVID-19 (coronavirus) led to an unprecedented global experiment in the delivery of remote learning. This report seeks to assess what lessons can be drawn from experiences of remote learning during COVID-19 in K-12 education, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. It focuses on the period from March 2020 to October 2021 and addresses the following key questions: 1. Was remote learning during COVID-19 taken up and if so, was it effective That is, did children learn as much as they did during pre-pandemic, in-person learning 2. What lessons can governments derive from this wide-spread experience 3. How might policymakers use these lessons to reimagine learning as schools begin to reopen This report is part of a larger effort led by the World Bank to provide guidance and technical assistance to optimize country effectiveness in the design and execution of remote learning strategies. It has been developed in conjunction with Remote Learning During the Global School Lockdown: Multi-Country Lessons, a qualitative study conducted between May and November 2020 to understand the perceived effectiveness of remote and remedial learning solutions implemented across 17 countries. -
Publication
Contrasting Experiences: Understanding the Longer-Term Impact of Improving Access to Pre-Primary Education in Rural Indonesia
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-02-02)This paper examines the child development outcomes of two cohorts of children who were exposed to the same intervention at different points in time. One cohort was eligible to access playgroups during the first year of a five-year project cycle, beginning at age four. The other cohort became eligible to access these services during the third year of a five-year project cycle, beginning at age three. The younger cohort was more likely to be exposed to playgroups for longer and at more age-appropriate times relative to the older cohort. The paper finds that enrollment rates and enrollment duration in preprimary education increased for both cohorts, but the enrollment effects were larger for the younger cohort. In terms of child development outcomes, there were short-term effects at age five that did not last until age eight, for both cohorts. Moreover, the younger cohort had substantially higher test scores during the early grades of primary school, relative to the older cohort. We document the extent to which program impacts can vary as a result of differences in project implementation. -
Publication
SMS Girl Data Insights: How Has COVID-19 Affected Support for Girls’ Education in Punjab, Pakistan?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)This brief presents initial findings from an ongoing phone survey of families in Punjab, Pakistan designed to assess what is happening to girls’ elementary school education during COVID-19. The data used in this brief describe the experiences of 5,898 families in Punjab between August and October 2020. Data have been weighted to make the sample representative of all schools in Punjab. This brief provides information from an on-going survey. Further data is being collected and analyzed. Subsequent briefs will provide updates on these families as we learn more about their experiences. Unless otherwise noted, statistics are based on the full sample of households contacted, 90 percent of which are families with girls in grades 5-7 before the pandemic. Statistics are weighted to make the sample representative of all schools in Punjab and to allow comparisons between boys and girls. -
Publication
Risks to Child Development and School Readiness among Children under Six in Pakistan: Findings from a Nationally Representative Phone Survey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)This paper analyzes the risks to child development and school readiness among children under age 6 in Pakistan. Drawing on a nationally representative telephone survey conducted between December 2021 and February 2022, it presents the first nationally representative estimates of child development for children under 3 years of age and school readiness for children 3 to 6 years of age, using internationally validated instruments. The paper examines how risk factors such as parental distress, lack of psychosocial stimulation, food insecurity, low maternal education, no enrollment in early childhood education, and living in a rural area are associated with children’s outcomes. The data indicate that more than half (57 percent) of parents with children under age 3 were distressed and that 61 percent of households reported cutting down on the size of or skipping meals since the start of the pandemic. The data reveal that over half of parents fail to engage in adequate psychosocial stimulation with their child and enrollment in early childhood education is very low (39 percent). The paper finds that child development outcomes decline rapidly as the number of risks increase. Specifically, for children under 3 years, lack of psychosocial stimulation at home and higher levels of parental distress were most significantly associated with lower child development levels. For a child aged 3 to 6 years, early childhood education enrollment and the amount of psychosocial stimulation the child receives at home had the strongest association with school readiness scores. -
Publication
Mama Knows (and Does) Best: Maternal Schooling Opportunities and Child Development in Indonesia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)This paper leverages quasi-experimental variation in increased access to basic formal education, introduced by a large-scale school construction program in Indonesia in the 1970s, to quantify the benefits to the children of women targeted by the program. Novel and rich data allow the analysis of a range of health, cognitive and socio-emotional development outcomes for children ages 6 to 8 in 2013. The paper finds that increased maternal access to schooling has positive and multidimensional effects on children. The effects are particularly salient at the bottom of the distributions of outcomes. Drawing on insights from economics, psychology, and sociology, the paper examines pathways for these impacts. Evidence suggests that mothers who were exposed to more schooling opportunities during childhood demonstrate less hostility toward their children when parenting and also invest more in their children's preschool education. -
Publication
Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)School closures due to COVID-19 have left more than a billion students out of school. This paper presents the results of simulations considering three, five and seven months of school closure and different levels of mitigation effectiveness resulting in optimistic, intermediate and pessimistic global scenarios. Using data on 157 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall. COVID-19 could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 0.9 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.9 years to between 7.0 and 7.6 years. Close to 7 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $355, $872, or $1,408 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,472 and $25,680 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, like girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by the school closures. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. The world could thus face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor and be unable to meet the goal by 2030 unless drastic remedial action is taken.