Person:
Hasan, Amer

Education Global Practice, South Asia Region
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Fields of Specialization
Early childhood development, Education, Impact evaluation
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ORCID
0000-0003-3809-376X
External Links
https://ideas.repec.org/f/pha1384.html
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Education Global Practice, South Asia Region
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Last updated: November 20, 2024
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.
Citations 34 Scopus

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Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being ×

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Maternal Mental Health and Its Influence on Children’s Early Development: Evidence from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-20) Tahir-Chowdhry, Mahreen; Hentschel, Elizabeth; Tomlinson, Heather; Ansari, Amna; Hasan, Amer; Yousafzai, Aisha; Hussain, Naveed
    This paper reports on the prevalence of three facets of mental health—depression, anxiety, and parenting stress—among mothers of children ages 0–6 years in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Data from mother-child dyads were analyzed to examine differences in maternal mental health and early childhood development outcomes by maternal educational attainment, urban versus rural setting, and refugee versus non-refugee status. The analysis finds a higher prevalence of self-reported mental health concerns among refugee, less-educated, and rural mothers relative to non-refugee, more-educated, and urban mothers. Maternal mental health concerns are significantly associated with lower levels of early childhood development. This paper also analyzes how exposure to stressors such as food insecurity, financial insecurity, being impacted by flooding, community crime, discrimination, and domestic violence exacerbate both maternal mental health and child outcomes. The regression analyses indicate a significant and negative compounding interaction of maternal depression, anxiety, and parenting stress on early childhood development for younger (0–3 years) and older (3–6 years) children, even after controlling for stressors and other covariates. Policy improvements are needed that focus on at-risk communities, providing mental health services and reducing exposure to stressors within communities and households.
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    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) Goldemberg, Diana; Azevedo, Joao Pedro; Iqbal, Syedah Aroob; Hasan, Amer; Geven, Koen
    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.
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    The Impact of Expanding Access to Early Childhood Services in Rural Indonesia: Evidence from Two Cohorts of Children
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07) Brinkman, Sally Anne; Hasan, Amer; Jung, Haeil; Kinnell, Angela; Pradhan, Menno
    This paper uses three waves of longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the start of the project and was immediately eligible for project-provided services when they began operation in 2009. The other cohort was children aged 1 at the start of the project and became eligible for project-provided services two years later. The paper presents intent-to-treat estimates of impact in the short term (first year of the project) and medium term (three years after the project started), using experimental and quasi-experimental methods. For the cohort of 4-year-olds, while the magnitude of the enrollment impact is similar across children from different backgrounds, the impact on child outcomes is larger for children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in the short and medium terms. However, for this cohort of children, it seems that project-provided playgroups encouraged substitution away from existing kindergartens, suggesting that future interventions should incorporate such possibilities into their design. For the average child in the younger cohort, the project led to improvements in physical health and well-being as well as language and cognitive development. For this cohort, there is little evidence of differential impact. This can be explained by the fact that children who enrolled soon after the centers opened (the older cohort) were generally poorer, compared with children who enrolled later (the younger cohort). This may be because of fee increases in project centers as project funding ended.