Publication:
Learning Poverty Updates and Revisions: What’s New?

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.88 MB)
381 downloads
English Text (155.08 KB)
19 downloads
Published
2024-11-05
ISSN
Date
2024-11-05
Author(s)
Cloutier, Marie-Hélène
Geven, Koen Martijn
Rogers, Halsey
Fazili, Sheena
Ning Wong, Yi
Akmal, Maryam
Stacy, Brian
Tran, Nguyet Thi Anh
Editor(s)
Abstract
This note is part of the April 2024 release of the latest country-level Learning Poverty estimates. The document details country-level changes to the underlying data used to produce the April 2024 Learning Poverty release and builds on the changes documented in the technical note accompanying the 2022 global release. This is the fourth release of updated and revised country numbers since the launch of the Learning Poverty measure in October 2019 by the World Bank and UNESCO. The current release provides Learning Poverty data for 125 countries.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Cloutier, Marie-Hélène; Geven, Koen Martijn; Rogers, Halsey; Fazili, Sheena; Ning Wong, Yi; Akmal, Maryam; Stacy, Brian; Sedmik, Elisabeth; Shmis, Tigran; Tran, Nguyet Thi Anh; Asad, Saher; Clarke, Marguerite; Liberman, Julia; Levin, Victoria; Alvarez, Horacio; Wane, Waly; Meky, Muna Salih. 2024. Learning Poverty Updates and Revisions: What’s New?. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42366 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Learning Poverty Updates and Revisions
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Azevedo, Joao Pedro Wagner De; Montoya, Silvia; Akmal, Maryam; Wong, Yi Ning; Gregory, Laura; Geven, Koen Martijn; Cloutier, Marie-Helene; Iqbal, Syedah Aroob; Imhof, Adolfo Gustavo; De Andrade Falcao, Natasha; Kouame, Christelle Signo; Dahal, Mahesh; Gebre, Tihtina Zenebe; Vargas Mancera, Maria Jose
    The July 2021 release of learning poverty estimates involves several changes to the data underlying the country-level learning poverty figures. This document provides details of the key changes made. Some country-level estimates have changed or become available for the first time due to new data from recent assessments: TIMSS 2019, PASEC 2019, and SEA-PLM 2019. In cases where new assessment data call for a change to the learning poverty estimates, the corresponding enrollment data used for learning poverty calculations have also been updated so that the enrollment year is as close as possible to the assessment year, depending on data availability. In the latest release, country-level estimates of learning poverty are available for 120 countries.
  • Publication
    Learning Losses during COVID-19
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10) Akmal, Maryam; Azevedo, João Pedro; Cloutier, Marie-Helene; Rogers, Halsey; Wong, Yi Ning
    This paper presents updated simulation results of the potential effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning outcomes globally. The simulation, which updates and extends prior work by Azevedo, Hasan et al. (2021) and Azevedo (2020), examines potential learning losses as the pandemic moves into the third year. Beyond reflecting the longer duration of the crisis, the paper extends prior work by using country-specific observed school closure information, accounts for the partial reopening of some education systems, updates the baseline Learning Poverty estimates to reflect its best estimate to date just before the pandemic (circa 2019), and uses updated June 2021 macroeconomic projections to reflect the economic magnitude of the crisis. The analysis finds that the overall learning levels are likely to fall substantially around the world. Under an “intermediate” scenario, school closures could potentially increase the share of children in Learning Poverty in low- and middle-income countries by 13 percentage points, to 70 percent. Globally, learning adjusted years of schooling could fall by 1.1 years, and the share of youth below minimum proficiency on the Programme for International Student Assessment could rise by 12.3 percentage points. Furthermore, school shutdowns could generate lifetime earning losses of $21 trillion. These results imply that decisive action is needed to recover and accelerate learning.
  • Publication
    What’s at Play? Unpacking the Relationship between Teaching and Learning
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-21) Stacy, Brian William; Akmal, Maryam; Rogers, F. Halsey; Venegas Marin, Sergio; Rajaram, Hersheena; Farysheuskaya, Viyaleta
    Using unique nationally representative school and system survey data from 13 education systems in low and middle-income countries collected through the World Bank’s Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD), we examine how the pedagogical practices, including practices to foster student engagement and subject content knowledge of primary-school teachers, correlate with their students’ learning outcomes. The authors find that student performance on literacy (and, to a lesser extent, math) assessments are correlated with receiving instruction from teachers with better-measured pedagogical skills. While the better-pedagogy effect is modest for the entire sample, it is statistically robust and quite substantial for the upper-middle-income countries. Based on a sub-sample of those education systems, we also find that using learning strategies that support greater student engagement appears to be highly predictive of student learning outcomes in literacy. Better pedagogical practices correlate with teachers’ exposure to more practical, school-based pedagogical support, for example through induction or mentoring and feedback on lesson plans, and with better teacher evaluation at the school level. The findings confirm the important role of interventions providing direct pedagogical support and feedback to teachers through training, instructional leadership, and evaluation, and they highlight the potential for interventions to foster student engagement and improve learning outcomes.
  • Publication
    Pakistan – Human Capital Review
    (Washington, DC, 2023-04-04) Ersado, Lire,; Hasan, Amer; Geven, Koen Martijn; Kathuria, Ashi Kohli; Baron, Juan; Bend, May; Ahmed, S. Amer
    Pakistan can realize major economic growth and development by investing in its people and their human capital. But the reality is that Pakistan’s human capital is low and has improved only marginally over the past three decades. Inequalities in human capital outcomes have persisted or widened over time between the rich and poor, men and women, and rural and urban areas and among the provinces. Human capital outcomes are low across the board, with even the most economically advantaged groups in Pakistan having lower human capital outcomes than less economically advantaged groups in peer countries. Pakistan’s Human Capital Index (HCI) value of 0.41 is low in both absolute and relative terms. It is lower than the South Asia average of 0.48, with Bangladesh at 0.46 and Nepal at 0.49. Pakistan’s human capital outcomes are more comparable to those in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has an average HCI value of 0.40. To enhance its human capital, Pakistan should adopt a life cycle approach to building, protecting, and deploying human capital, starting before birth, continuing through early childhood development, and schooling, culminating in increasingly productive employment. This calls for a long-term commitment, recognition of the multidimensional and cumulative nature of human capital investments, deliberate efforts from multiple stakeholders and sectors to build on intersectoral linkages, and a continuity of policies across political parties and governments. Many countries previously at Pakistan’s level of development have managed to precisely do this, even with regional variations and gaps just as large. Pakistan has the tools to implement the recommendations in this report, provide stewardship for human capital investments, and enhance economic growth over the long term. Pakistan’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the country can manage complex challenges, despite its institutional constraints.
  • Publication
    Is there a Learning Crisis in Punjab?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-08) Geven, Koen Martijn
    In 2018, the World Bank released World Development Report which showed that the world is facing a ‘Learning Crisis’. Following up from that report, the Bank has launched the Human Capital Project to mobilize more resources, including for the improvement of learning outcomes. Subsequently, global leaders have been increasingly focused on solving this learning crisis and have renewed attention for Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education. Pakistan is an early adopter of this Human Capital Project, and the new government is taking the lead to address the root causes of the learning crisis. This report aims to help the government with that agenda, by quantifying the extent of the learning crisis, and to highlight the main causes of the crisis. According the World Development Report, the ‘Learning Crisis’ consists of three main elements. The first is that access to schooling is still unequally distributed. While there have been huge efforts to expand schooling, there are still countries (including Pakistan) with millions of children out of school. Children living in regions with violence, children from poorer families and children with physical or mental disabilities are still often excluded. The second element is that even those who are in school are often not learning anything at all. In Malawi and Zambia, for instance, 89 percent of students could not read a single word by the end of Grade 2. In India, that figure is 85 percent. These numbers are important, as children who do not master basic literacy will probably never catch up with the curriculum. In other words, schooling is not necessarily the same as learning. The third element of the learning crisis is that the proximate causes of the learning crisis, low quality teaching, student school readiness, school leadership and school inputs, are not systematically addressed by actors in the system. One of the reasons behind this is that there is no systematic data collection on these factors.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Global Economic Prospects, June 2025
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-10) World Bank
    The global economy is facing another substantial headwind, emanating largely from an increase in trade tensions and heightened global policy uncertainty. For emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), the ability to boost job creation and reduce extreme poverty has declined. Key downside risks include a further escalation of trade barriers and continued policy uncertainty. These challenges are exacerbated by subdued foreign direct investment into EMDEs. Global cooperation is needed to restore a more stable international trade environment and scale up support for vulnerable countries grappling with conflict, debt burdens, and climate change. Domestic policy action is also critical to contain inflation risks and strengthen fiscal resilience. To accelerate job creation and long-term growth, structural reforms must focus on raising institutional quality, attracting private investment, and strengthening human capital and labor markets. Countries in fragile and conflict situations face daunting development challenges that will require tailored domestic policy reforms and well-coordinated multilateral support.
  • Publication
    Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03) Vagliasindi, Maria; Gorgulu, Nisan
    This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.
  • Publication
    Shifting Gears: The Private Sector as an Engine of Growth in the Middle East and North Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23) Gatti, Roberta; Onder, Harun; Islam, Asif M.; Torres, Jesica; Mele, Gianluca; Bennett, Federico; Chun, Sumin; Lotfi, Rana; Suvanov, Ilias
    The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is estimated to have grown at a modest rate of 1.9 percent in 2024 and is expected to grow moderately at 2.6 percent in 2025. This is against a backdrop of increased global uncertainty, particularly in trade policy. The region is far from the frontier in standards of living, largely due to low productivity. This issue of the MENA Economic Update sheds light on a critical engine of productivity growth: the private sector. Businesses create jobs, boost livelihoods, and serve as a bastion of innovation in the economy. The MENA private sector, however, is not dynamic and is ill prepared to absorb shocks. To boost the performance of the private sector, governments in the region may need to rethink their role in engaging with markets including improving competition, the business environment, and the availability of data. Additionally, private sector businesses in the region can increase performance through better management practices and harnessing untapped talent in the region.
  • Publication
    What Have We Learned about the Effectiveness of Infrastructure Investment as a Fiscal Stimulus? A Literature Review
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Vagliasindi, Maria; Gorgulu, Nisan
    Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and through the more recent Asian Crisis of 1997 and Great Recession of 2008/09, governments have experimented with Keynesian style fiscal stimulus to support employment and accelerate economic recovery. The effectiveness of these policies depends on the size of fiscal multipliers. A large body of economic literature has estimated such multipliers, with gradually increasing precision, due to econometric improvements and better ways to identify fiscal impulses. Overall, the largest multipliers are found to be associated with public investment, as opposed to other types of spending. Such public investment multipliers are typically below one in the short run, but studies with multi-year horizons suggest that values higher than unity can be attained over time. The size of multipliers is sensitive to economic conditions. During recessions, and periods of high unemployment, transfer payments appear sometimes to offer higher multipliers than public investment. An important exception is when fiscal and monetary policies are closely coordinated and interest rates approach zero, conditions that provide the strongest evidence for the efficacy of public investment multipliers. Other institutional factors also play a crucial role in determining the size of the public investment multiplier, in particular the country’s absorptive capacity, and the selection of high-quality shovel ready projects. However, there is limited empirical evidence available on the magnitude of fiscal multipliers in developing country settings, or for infrastructure sectors or subsectors specifically. The few studies available suggest that certain types of green infrastructure (energy efficiency, solar energy, and so forth) may bring employment benefits in the short run, while innovative digital infrastructure may yield longer-run benefits for economic growth. The relevance of these findings to the current COVID-19 crisis is explored.
  • Publication
    Business Ready 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03) World Bank
    Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.