Higher education can advance inclusive development and foster a transformed society. To help overcome entrenched inequalities in South Africa, the government provides financial support to students for whom university would otherwise be unaffordable. This support offers students access to higher education – and all the economic benefits it brings for both the individual and society at large.

The financial aid system has undergone recent changes that bring a new set of complex but critical considerations. This article explores these potential issues that could change students’ incentives for going to university, as well as universities’ incentives to improve student performance and graduation rates. These changes have the potential to impede social mobility and inclusive development.

We identify a lack of evidence about whether the current funding system is (cost-) effectively promoting upward mobility. To fill this gap, we suggest that data that tracks students from university entrance to employment is necessary to inform decisions that can ensure higher education fulfils its social and economic potential.

How is higher education funded in South Africa?

Universities in South Africa receive direct government funding through subsidies that are linked to research, student enrolment and student graduation rates. They also receive funds indirectly through the tuition and accommodation fees of students at the university who are supported by the government’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). This program enables students to attend university by fully covering their tuition and accommodation fees. Students also receive allowances for living and transport expenses, as well as study materials.

Until recently, universities received much more money through direct subsidies than indirectly through NSFAS. Following a costly and contentious expansion of NSFAS in 2018, however, universities now receive roughly the same amount from both sources, with total funding showing a decline in 2023 (see Figure 1).

A shift in funding sources, towards NSFAS and away from subsidies, may not be problematic if total finances to institutions were to remain unchanged. In reality, however, it introduces two potential ramifications. The first relates to the fact that around a quarter of the total NSFAS allocation shown in Figure 1 goes directly to students through allowances (own estimate for 2019), rather than to institutions. With constrained budgetary resources, this shift could reduce institutions’ income and affect their ability to function sustainably.

Figure 1: Nominal growth in funding for universities and students (2011–2023)

Source: University State Budgets – Public Report; DHET March 2023 in presentation by Diane Parker and Thandi Lewin, SAAIR 2023.

The second ramification is that the changing structure of funding could potentially shift universities’ focus towards enrolling more students, to capture funding from tuition and accommodation fees, and reduce emphasis on improving student performance and graduation rates. This could have profound consequences for upward mobility. University graduates have much better chances of securing well-paid work in South Africa than non-graduates (including those who drop out of university).

Social spending for social mobility?

South Africa offers social welfare payments for children and older adults, but there is a gap in protection for the working age population. Unemployment rates are high among this group, and especially among younger adults (34.3% of people aged 15–24 were not in Employment, Education or Training in Quarter 2 of 2023).

NSFAS acts as a form of social protection for members of this age group who attend post-secondary education. For example, NSFAS continued to provide allowances to students who remained enrolled during the COVID-19 pandemic. At 1500 Rand (R) per month, this likely represented an important source of income to students’ households. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, like other social grants, NSFAS allowances are shared with students’ families. As a value comparison, the Social Relief of Distress Grant, introduced during the pandemic, is just R350 per month – although it reaches many more people.

If viewed in this way, NSFAS is an expensive ‘social protection mechanism’ available to the very select few who can access higher education. Nonetheless, NSFAS expenditure growth is projected to be 11% for 2019–2024), exceeding growth in university subsidies (3.9%), inflation (5%), social grant expenditure (6%), and basic education (2.5%).

Projected rises in enrolments and increasing demand for NSFAS mean that it is more important than ever for policymakers to understand the returns to NSFAS, and the cost-effectiveness of these large government investments.

Two further, essential considerations arise. Does the potential for upward mobility and the consequent social and economic gains justify the growth in NSFAS in our current financially strained environment? Furthermore, will the way in which funding is currently being apportioned, especially under the current NSFAS policy, lead to the desired graduation and labour market benefits?

Figure 2: Labour market absorption for 2015 NSFAS graduates, disaggregated by institution

Source: Adapted from Wildschut et al. (2020). Transformation, stratification and higher education: exploring the absorption into employment of public financial aid beneficiaries across the South African higher education system.

Is NSFAS (cost-) effective?

Evidence on graduate destinations is limited in South Africa. An exception is a study that matches tax data and NSFAS students who graduated under the previous NSFAS model. The incentive structure was different under the previous scheme and updated evidence is urgently required, but the study does show how important data is for understanding the impact of the sector on social mobility. For example, Figure 2 shows that among the 2015 cohort of NSFAS-funded graduates, positively, over half were in formal sector employment in 2017. That said, institutions with the highest share of NSFAS students face some of the lowest employment prospects. Relatedly, dropout among NSFAS students is high in some of the institutions with better employment rates.

On the one hand, dropout by students who are unlikely to graduate can be viewed, purely from a budgetary perspective, as a good thing for public coffers. On the other hand, NSFAS could shift the costs vs. benefits of enrolling in university because it offers social protection against a backdrop of high unemployment. In other words, does NSFAS make poorer students more likely to enrol in university, and potentially into programs not aligned with the skills needs of the economy – even if they know they may not graduate?  

Another intricacy that policymakers would do well to consider, however, is dropout among students who are likely to succeed but cannot continue their studies because they have reached their maximum number of years of funding. They represent a substantial public investment and impede the sector’s ability to foster upward mobility, at a substantial cost.

A call for evidence

Policymakers face contention between the supportive role of NSFAS, and its possible distortionary effects on student and university performance. Universities face shrinking subsidies, alongside pressures to ensure student success and employability. Ultimately, a better understanding of whether the current funding system is (cost-) effectively promoting upward mobility crucially requires comprehensive monitoring of system-wide student success – from the day they enrol through to their graduation and employment. This data exists in silos but is not (yet) linked in the way that is urgently needed to inform decision making.

What’s more, this evidence can be used to help universities collaborate with each other to save overall costs across the sector. This will be key as financial pressures rise. An example of this strategic collaboration already exists in the Siyaphumelela (`we succeed’) Network Initiative. This aims to expand evidence-based student success efforts by building on existing strengths, sharing capacity throughout the sector, and serving institutions based on their needs and abilities.

This article is published in collaboration with the International Economic Associations’ Women in Leadership in Economics initiative, which aims to enhance the role of women in economics through research, building partnerships, and amplifying voices. 

The post South Africa’s higher education funding conundrum: could the current funding system hamper social mobility and university performance? appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Underfunding has been a major challenge in Nigeria’s tertiary education sector, which is primarily financed by the government. In 2011, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) was established as a counterpart intervention fund based on a 2% tax on profits for companies registered in Nigeria. The TETFund’s massive positive impact on the quality of teaching, learning and institution‐based research suggests that it is a sustainable funding model for other education sectors and other developing countries to emulate.

Imagine being a student in a government-owned university and having your program interrupted for up to eight months. That is exactly what happened in Nigeria recently when the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) downed tools from 14^th February to 11^th October 2022 and crippled academic activities in the Nigerian university system (NUS), especially among public higher education institutions (HEIs).

The problem is perennial: the country has experienced approximately 15 semesters (66 months) of similar industrial action since 1999, with the ASUU always citing gross underfunding of the NUS as one of its main motivations for going on strike.

HEI sector challenges in Nigeria

Nigeria is the most populous black country in both sub-Saharan Africa and globally. Its education sector is sub-divided into three levels: primary education (six years); secondary education (six years); and tertiary education (at least four years). This is what is known as the 6-3-3-4 system, since the secondary level is further sub-divided into junior and senior secondary levels of three years each.

Overall, all levels of the country’s education sector are suffering some form of crisis, including infrastructural decay, poor conditions of service, and inadequate regulation, as well as low literacy and enrolment rates. Although the tertiary or HEI sector (which comprises of mostly public universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, and vocational training centers) is critical to national development, it has remained largely underfunded over the years.

Publicly-owned HEIs in Nigeria are mainly funded by the government, which is the norm in most developing countries. Key reforms have been proposed in terms of recovery and reallocation of public funding, encouraging student loans and scholarships, as well as the micromanagement and privatization of public HEIs. However, the budget allocated to fund tertiary education in Nigeria is currently one of the lowest globally, with only about 5.4% allocated for the entire education sector in 2022, down from 8.4% in 2019, in addition to decreasing lecturer-to-student ratios.

As a result, Nigeria’s tertiary education is riddled with incessant industrial actions, low-grade teaching/research throughput, high dropout rates, brain drain, prolonged time to obtain a degree, and, in some cases, low-quality graduates.

TETFund: HEI sustainable funding instrument and impact assessment

To address some of the challenges confronting the HEI sector in Nigeria, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) was established in 2011 to impose, manage, and administer the education tax for providing counterpart funding for public HEIs.

The TETFund – an offshoot of the Education Trust Fund (ETF), which was established in 1993 – is an intervention fund set up to tackle underfunding of public HEIs in Nigeria. The fund is generated from a 2% education tax imposed on companies in Nigeria and channeled through the federal tax-collecting agency, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).

The funding mandate of the TETFund is three-fold – project funding, staff training and development, and institutional-based research (IBR) – instituted to benefit all public tertiary institutions whether at federal, state, or local government levels.

For over a decade (2011 to 2021), the TETFund has demonstrated a track record of being a sustainable funding instrument in Nigeria’s HEI sector. It is on record that the fund has expended over 2.5 trillion Naira (EUR 5.6 billion) since inception to date, at a 50% beneficiary rate, meaning that it has penetrated up to half of its beneficiary institutions since 2011.

The biggest impact has been on infrastructural development, with over 152,000 projects launched across various tertiary institutions since 2011. These projects include the construction of lecture halls, laboratories, student residences, offices, and roads.

Another salient impact of the TETFund on Nigeria’s HEI sector over the last decade is in terms of capacity development. Within the country, 10,632 lecturers have completed a PhD degree, while 9,072 have completed a master’s degree. Within the same timeframe, the fund has provided scholarships for 4,485 lecturers to obtain  PhD degrees and 3,192 lecturers to obtain master’s degrees, outside Nigeria.

Conclusion

The massive infrastructural and human capacity developments witnessed over the last decade through the TETFund, as shown in Figure 1, are indicators of the increased quality of teaching and learning in federal HEIs in Nigeria.

Since the TETFund is supplementary in nature and not an exclusive funding structure for public HEIs in Nigeria, it is crucial for other stakeholders such as the relevant government ministry to match the TETFund’s quota with an increased share of the statutory budgets. This will help cut down on incessant strike actions, which continue to hamper the major gains derived through the TETFund.

Beyond that, there is a need to accelerate the TETFund’s beneficiary rate to 100% so that all state-owned institutions can benefit equally. In addition, greater commitments are expected from contributors to the TETFund to increase the collection rate while matching the fund’s growing institutional allocations.

Tertiary institutions should also align their institutional-based research to rank with evolving research trends and industrial needs. This will further encourage important partnerships and collaborations and help generate counterpart funds.

Education income tax, as exemplified by the TETFund model, should be considered as a sustainable funding instrument that could serve as a catalyst of transformation for all levels of the education sector in developing countries, provided it continues to be efficiently administered and managed.

Figure 1: Infrastructural and staff development projects in Nigeria’s public HEIs funded by TETFund (2011 to 2021)

The post Taxes to finance tertiary education: lessons from Nigeria’s TETFund appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

The crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has raised global income inequality both within and between countries. At the same time, research shows that in countries where inequality is high, individuals tend to consent to inequality rather than critique it. This trend has been explained by a growing conviction that inequality is solely reflective of an individual’s talent and effort. Such meritocratic beliefs also result in lower demand for inequality-reducing policies by the public.

Will this paradox of rising inequality paired with increasingly lower public concern culminate in support for fewer or more selective welfare policies? How can this trend be reconciled with the recent appeal to expand and strengthen welfare systems to respond to future crises?

One way to explore this is to acknowledge that belief systems are not set in stone. On the contrary, beliefs are influenced by experiences, situations, and encounters. The economic uncertainty generated by the pandemic challenged the established ‘normal’. It resulted in less stability as a consequence of unforeseen changes in people’s lives.

Our recent survey of young South Africans confirms this: 71% of respondents evaluated their income-generating activities as less stable. The same applies to their monthly savings, investments, and mental health.

In addition, who experiences which kinds of shocks is often explained by existing inequalities. In the case of South Africa, those living in poverty experienced a lower capacity to transform their daily lives in beneficial ways.

At the same time, governments responded to economic shocks experienced by households and businesses with an unprecedented expansion of welfare policies. For example, 955 social assistance policies were initiated in 2020 on a global level.

Databases and research projects such as the Covid-19 Government Response Tracker or CoronaNet continuously update, consolidate, and evaluate crisis responses to understand their effectiveness, for example, in improving health outcomes. A rupture of the status quo paired with policy innovations has also been translated into a narrative of ‘building back better’ or returning to a ‘new normal’.

Has the uncertainty produced by recent events changed how individuals explain inequalities? How do they perceive and support current policy expansions?

These considerations matter for future elections where welfare states and their design are an essential part of political agendas. They also matter since the pandemic does not constitute an isolated event. With climate change and political conflicts, future economic crises of similar impact are likely to occur.

There is reason to believe that experiencing uncertainty reminds us of developments beyond our control. This may counteract meritocratic beliefs that are linked to a heightened sense of individual agency, and which therefore emphasize our actions and talents as a primary explanation of where we end up on the economic ladder.

Indeed, our survey shows that South Africans who experienced greater uncertainty – expressed as general worry, anxiety about making plans, and less optimism about the future due to the pandemic – also attributed less of their success to meritocratic attributes.

Uncertainty may have also brought about awareness about inequalities and greater concerns for others, for example, demanding better wages for essential workers. Earlier research highlights that ‘pro-social’ behavior increases when our evaluations of uncertainty do not just include future outcomes per se, but also whether such outcomes have negative consequences for others.

Again, our results suggest that South Africans who experienced more uncertainty showed greater support for more expansive, universal, welfare policies.

But uncertainty may play a two-fold role. It might highlight some economic challenges – those experienced by many people or within daily encounters – while reducing awareness of others that are experienced by fewer people or those at the margins of society.

While there may be momentum for greater popular support for inequality-reducing policies and welfare benefits, a thorough examination of who is considered ‘worthy beneficiaries’ in policy design is vital to avoid political bias, exclusion, and the exacerbation of existing inequalities. This is especially important for shock-responsive welfare policies, where a variety of needs must be recognized quickly and adequately.

The post Public support for policies to reduce inequality: the impact of uncertainty appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Girls’ education is a driving force for economic development, geopolitical stability, and progress on climate change, as evidenced in research by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the World Bank. Achieving better access and quality of girls’ secondary education in Uganda is a priority across the sector. But there is a disconnect between this aspiration and delivery: girls’ secondary education is not guaranteed and is a complex deliverable.

Secondary education is particularly challenging in terms of enrolment and access, especially among girls. Evidence shows that girls systematically fall behind in terms of school completion, educational attainment, and literacy levels. Less than 30% of adolescent girls complete lower secondary education in Uganda.

Furthermore, negative stereotypes hold girls back from education as cultural expectations of how girls are treated and raised, at home, at school, and in their communities, persist. This translates into how they are taught in the classroom, where evidence suggests that teachers traditionally have lower expectations and biases against female students.

Girls’ access to quality secondary education is linked to lower fertility rates and higher levels of female participation in society. Supporting girls to complete secondary education and achieve their full potential in educational attainment, and preparing them to be productive members of society requires gender-sensitive, participatory, and context-driven solutions.

Central to ensuring this delivery is consideration of the evidence around girls’ education and keeping it central to all program phases – planning, design, delivery, and monitoring. Several pieces of evidence show what works in practice.

Gender-responsive pedagogy

Global evidence highlights the important role of school leaders and teachers in improving educational outcomes for girls, by creating the right environment for learning. Building their capacity in instructional leadership for quality, equitable pedagogy is at the centre of this role.

But there are continued barriers to school leaders being able to fulfill this role. The Uganda National Strategy for Girls’ Education is an exciting step towards a cohesive approach to supporting girls in education and demonstrates the government’s commitment. Our experience shows that it can be challenging for school leaders to translate this into specific targets or outcomes, which can hamper implementation.

Training in specifically gender-responsive instructional leadership and school improvement planning is a critical driver for empowering teachers to support their female students. At secondary schools that are part of Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS), strong leadership is associated with an increase in test scores of up to 10 percentage points. It has also been shown that a key aspect of PEAS’ high quality school leadership is leaders’ understanding of individual student learning targets and that this strongly correlates with faster progress in learning.

When teachers are trained and supported to use learner-centered, gender-transformative teaching methods, there is consistent evidence of a change in the behaviors and attitudes of girls and boys in the classroom. Examples include asking girls and boys questions with the same level of difficulty, inviting girls and boys to participate in equal measure, and challenging widespread cultural bias about gendered roles and abilities.

This contrasts with the teacher-centered approach found historically in Ugandan schools. In the FCDO Girls’ Education Challenge evaluation at PEAS schools, 96% of girls who felt welcomed by their teachers envisioned completing school, whereas only 82% of girls who did not feel welcomed by their teachers at comparison schools envisioned completing secondary education.

Girls’ clubs

In addition to creating and delivering a gender-sensitive curriculum and pedagogy, enriching girls’ social and practical skills outside academia is important for their education and futures beyond formal schooling. These skills include building healthy relationships, dealing with stress and anxiety, and planning for the future. This is especially important after the negative impact of school closures: the increasing rate of teenage pregnancies as a result of Covid-19 is likely to intensify the gender gap for a whole generation, and demonstrates the crucial role of secondary education in reducing gender inequality (Mo Ibrahim Foundation).

One way in which soft skills can be successfully delivered is through girls’ clubs – dedicated spaces and groups in school that create a safe environment for all learners to explore their interests, learn about menstrual health and hygiene, and confide in teachers. There is robust evidence that clubs in a variety of settings can have positive impacts on girls’ life skills.

Girls’ clubs may also mitigate future negative impacts on enrolment and attendance caused by school closures, which is now more important than ever as high numbers of girls have been dropping out. This is particularly crucial in Uganda, where schools were closed for two years, the longest period anywhere in the world.

One mechanism identified in Sierra Leone reveals evidence that by providing girls with a club where they may continue to learn and maintain their social networks, they may be more able to avoid or delay pregnancy. While there is a place for targeted and well-planned interventions to tackle specific gendered barriers to education, evidence shows that interventions that deliver benefits for girls alone may lead to unintended consequences and increased divisions between girls and boys.

General interventions bring added value to boys and are just as effective at delivering high impact for girls as girl-focused interventions. This means embedding safeguarding, infrastructure, pedagogy, and life skills school-wide.

Girls’ clubs are also a central part of the PEAS model. The clubs are student-led to encourage more open discussion, as research has shown the effectiveness of this peer-to-peer model. Boys also participate in the clubs, to help change attitudes at the school and community level. In the evaluation carried out by the FCDO in 2019, teachers linked girls’ clubs to increased girls’ confidence.

Female role models drive girls’ attainment and successful post-school transitions             

Evidence suggests that girls’ clubs and empowerment programs can help to shift gender norms, attitudes, and practices by increasing girls’ self-confidence, encouraging them to express their views. Exposure to female leaders as role models improves opinions of female students towards themselves and other girls and women, and weakens gender stereotypes about roles and norms. Research from Brookings also suggests that female role models meaningfully increase parents’ aspirations for their daughters and adolescent girls’ aspirations for their own education and careers.

Experience with role models also exposes learners to many useful life skills outside the classroom, and is an important strategy for the empowerment of adolescent girls that enables them to take control of their education. Skills development equips girls with the knowledge necessary to navigate adolescence, relationships, and the world of finance and savings.

Findings from the PEAS program highlight that girls are motivated to enroll and stay in school if they have female role models, and that this is reflected in the appointment of senior women teachers in PEAS schools. Evidence shows that engaging with the senior women teachers in PEAS schools leads to a 264% increase in girls’ chances of developing reading and writing skills.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored some of the key components in providing access to education for girls. Prioritizing girls’ education and embedding systems such as the ones explored above into business as usual are crucial for long-lasting change. Making education work better for girls improves results for boys too. When girls are learning, everybody wins.

The post Ensuring access to high-quality education for girls appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Sustaining progress in human development in South Asia is key to achieving the global targets at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The region accounts for nearly two-fifths of the world’s poor, nearly half of the world’s malnourished children and the largest number of stunted children in the world.

But South Asia is also the region that saw a sharp decline in its poverty rate between 1990 and 2015: from 52% to 17%. Unfortunately, this trend may be reversed by the events of the past couple of years: as many as 400 million people could be pushed into poverty following the coronavirus outbreak. 

Restoring the pre-pandemic trend in poverty reduction in the region will be challenging but not impossible. South Asia’s achievements in poverty reduction and improvements in human development during the period of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mask an uneven pattern of progress and significant differences in policy choices within the region. Yet there are important lessons from the MDG era that can help to accelerate future progress in post-pandemic South Asia.

New evidence on South Asia’s development progress during the MDG period confirms that there has been significant convergence. The region has made considerable progress since 1990 and, as a result, by the end of the MDG campaign, it had caught up with richer regions on many important social indicators (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Poverty eradication (MDG 1) in South Asia: selected indicators

Source: Will South Asia Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? Learning from the MDG Experience

This is good news. But past trends in human development are insufficient to produce success during the SDG era. Recent projections indicate that important milestones, such as eradicating income poverty, will not be achieved by 2030. With a ‘business as usual’ approach, it would take the region another 63 years to eliminate poverty (a poverty headcount ratio of $1.90 a day).

Figure 2: State capacity, health and education expenditure in South Asia

Source: Will South Asia Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? Learning from the MDG Experience

So, where next? The SDGs agenda is much more ambitious than that of the MDGs. Delivery will require genuine commitment from national elites, as well as significant stepping up of governments’ organizational efforts.

Above all, achieving the SDGs will require increased financial resources. Traditionally, this is where development cooperation can intervene and provide a boost to progress on the SDGs. But these are not normal times for development cooperation. Foreign aid has been flat over the last few years, with no increase in sight given the growing strength of nationalist rhetoric in key donor countries.

For Nepal and Bangladesh, success with the MDGs has facilitated their graduation from the status of ‘least developed countries’, but the corollary is that there is now greater uncertainty about future aid flows. Moreover, war in Europe and a possible global recession may reduce revenues further and, at the same time, increase the demand for government spending.

In this context, two factors are likely to be important for South Asia’s prospects. The first is its inadequate fiscal allocations to social development. In both education and health spending as a percentage of GDP, the region ranks even below sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 2). 

The second factor is limited government effectiveness in delivering public goods. Both barriers are important dimensions of state capacity, in which South Asia lags behind other developing regions. Addressing the gap in state capacity is vital, given the changes in the goals for global development.

The slowdown in economic growth has limited the scope to rely on private incomes to achieve the SDGs. A public expenditure-led approach to service delivery is necessary. Yet the region suffers not only from large gaps in basic social infrastructure: South Asia’s tax-to-GDP ratios are also some of the lowest in the world. These disadvantages are rooted in administrative capacity deficits, which undermine efforts to mobilize revenue, as well as spending effectively.

Building an effective state depends on many factors, including a country’s history and geography. But we know that it is also a political process requiring the consolidation of political institutions to provide institutionalized checks and balances on the discretionary power of the executive.

This is part of a gradual change, one that, by building confidence among citizens in public processes, will have long-lasting effects going beyond the SDG period. Indeed, it is a development goal in itself, as SDG 16 explicitly refers to building effective, inclusive and transparent institutions (Targets 16.6 and 16.7).

A simulation analysis confirms that there are significant returns to investment in state capacity. If government spending on education and health were to be raised to levels witnessed in other developing regions (such as Latin America and East Asia), alongside improvements in state effectiveness in delivering public goods, South Asia would significantly accelerate progress in achieving the SDGs.

This is particularly the case in areas that are critical to the region’s progress on the goals of No Poverty (SDG 1), Quality Education (SDG 4), Gender Equality (SDG 5), and Inclusive Growth (SDG 8).

South Asia’s success stories with the MDGs have created new opportunities as well as challenges. Rapid improvements in social indicators have created much optimism for meeting the targets of the SDGs. At the same time, sustained economic growth has created a new middle class aspiring for higher living standards and better human development outcomes. These aspirations will remain unfulfilled by 2030 if the twin deficits in state capacity and social spending on health and education remain unaddressed.

The post Effective states for sustainable development in South Asia appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Since gaining independence, many former colonies have faced the dilemma of whether to continue using the colonial language in their education system or to revert to their native language. Some countries have maintained the colonial language as the language of instruction in schools, while others have replaced the colonial language with their local language.

To some, teaching school students in their native language seems to be an obvious choice. Since children learn at school through spoken and written language, learning in the mother tongue, especially during the early years of formal education, may help them to improve their cognitive skills, and allow them to transfer their knowledge to learning in a second language later on.

Language of instruction may also have effects on teachers’ ability to teach. Poor outcomes for students may be exacerbated if their teachers have limited or sub-standard command of the language of instruction.

On the other hand, teaching in a non-native language may be more useful. Fluency in the dominant language used in the local economy, typically the colonial language, may bring better job market outcomes. This is especially true with the English language, where there may be employment advantages even in countries where English is not widely spoken.

Having a well-designed language policy can make a difference to learning in a multilinguistic environment. But how to best impart various languages to children, without sacrificing their ability to develop core skills, is a major concern for both families and policy-makers.

Unfortunately, this choice can be difficult to make in countries with dozens of different languages and dialects, or in contexts where students speak one language at home and another in the playground or classroom.

It is also a challenge for researchers to get clear estimates of the impact of language of instruction on children’s cognitive skills. For a start, countries that change their language of instruction in schools typically do so abruptly. They also tend to apply the change to all students at once, making it difficult to distinguish the effects of a switch in language of instruction from the effects of children learning in their first or second language.

In addition, data are not widely available since many of the language policy changes around the world occurred several decades ago. Standardized tests were not widely conducted at that time.

Finally, when the language of instruction is changed, both students and teachers are affected. Even if it were possible to study the impact of a policy change on test scores, it is difficult to differentiate the effects of the language change on children’s ability to learn and on the quality of teachers’ instruction.

In recent research, we focus on a language policy change in Malaysia. Variations in the way that the policy was applied to different cohorts of students speaking different native languages provide a unique setting in which to distinguish the effects of switching the language of instruction and the effects of using a non-native language (English) as the language of instruction.

We measure the impacts on the test performance of children who speak different native languages (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, or Tamil) with the help of several waves of data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) and a research technique known as the synthetic control method to provide a reliable counterfactual – what would have happened in different circumstances.

Our results show that students performed worse in mathematics and science tests after the language of instruction in these subjects was switched from Bahasa Malaysia to English between their primary and secondary school years.

The impact of learning mathematics and science in English throughout primary and secondary education was even more negative. Boys fared worse than girls across the board.

The study suggests that children learning in their native languages develop their core skills better. But it is not able to quantify the extent to which changing the language of instruction negatively affected teachers’ ability to teach.

Our research and much of the evidence simply shows that when children are taught in their native language, they can more effectively acquire core skills that are important for the development of other skills.

Unfortunately, such evidence is often overlooked, to the detriment of children’s learning. It is estimated that 40% of school students worldwide are not taught core subjects in a language that they speak and understand regularly. As a result, many of them, especially among the most disadvantaged, are unable to learn critical skills that can help them in the longer term.

Given the importance of implementing the ‘right’ language policy, it is vital that teaching is done in the most effective language, and consistently, to prevent harming learning outcomes and to ensure that children have the best chance to learn foundational skills.

As change in educational systems is inevitable, we hope that studies like this one, and many others supporting the need to teach foundational skills in a native language, are not omitted from consideration by those designing and implementing language policy.

The post Language of instruction matters for learning foundational skills appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Many children lost time in school because of Covid-19, but children from the poorest communities may have lost out the most. This is because the extent to which remote learning or home support can compensate for lost time varies enormously.

The challenges of education associated with the pandemic underline a more generic issue: how do the contributions from both schools and families combine to produce learning outcomes? And, why is there so much inequality in those outcomes?

It is well known that household conditions matter a great deal for education. For example, differences in parental literacy (especially of mothers) and household financial resources tend to make a very large independent contribution to learning outcomes. Indeed, children in very poor households may never even attend school – or they drop out early to work.

There are also large differences in school quality, both across and within countries. This means that children who attend ‘better’ schools – typically, those with better teachers – often learn much more than their peers.

These inequalities in learning outcomes have serious implications for the level of social mobility in a country. Addressing learning inequalities can be one way to increase social mobility and reduce inequality in the future.

Combining household and school contributions to learning

An understudied question is the extent to which there are interactions between two different groups of inputs – those from households and those from schools. For example, if they were simply independent of each other, then we would expect to find no systematic relationship between the quality of schooling and household conditions (within a given country or location).

But in theory, a positive association is quite likely – richer families can choose to move to areas with better schools; or more qualified teachers may prefer to work in richer neighborhoods with better amenities. So, children from more advantaged households may be matched to better schools, public or private, giving them an extra step up and contributing to lower levels of social mobility for more disadvantaged students overall.

In a recent study, published by the United Nations University World Institute of Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and the World Bank Economic Review, we investigated this further. Specifically, we looked at the extent to which children from different kinds of families sort between schools in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda).

Focusing on actual learning outcomes for one million children, as measured by the Uwezo surveys, we developed a new method to distinguish between the contributions of households, schools, and their interactions — described as ‘sorting’. We measured the scale of the contribution of each component to overall inequalities in learning outcomes, noting that unequal outcomes are likely to persist over time and show up in other indicators later in life, such as adult income.

As Figure 1 shows, our main finding is that sorting does indeed add to other educational inequalities. Overall, children from less advantaged households tend to attend poorer-quality schools. This component accounts for around 16% of inequalities in educational opportunities within communities, which is almost as large as the contribution from differences in school quality (19%).

Figure 1: Decomposition of contributions to overall inequality of opportunity

Policy challenges

The main implication of this result is for policy-makers concerned with educational outcomes, but it also has important implications for anyone working to improve social mobility and reduce inequality in society more broadly.

In East Africa, the phenomenon of educational sorting — where children from poorer families systematically attend lower quality schools — represents a double learning disadvantage. It suggests that in addition to raising the quality of education in general, it is also critical to make the quality of schooling more equal – ideally, by equalizing access to high(er) quality education for all children.

How can this be done? While there is no magic bullet, one priority should be to raise the quality of schooling specifically in the most deprived and poorly-served communities. To do so, a body of evidence suggests that a strict focus on learning fundamentals (reading, writing, and mathematics), taught at the specific level of the ability of the child (not just their age or grade) is critical.

In addition, decision-makers should consider channeling extra resources to these schools. Possibilities include provision of incentives for teachers to reside in poorer locations, recruiting additional teaching assistants from the local community, providing intensive remedial (support) programs, and external scholarship programs.

The point is that although we cannot reasonably eliminate all differences in school quality, we can focus on ensuring that children from disadvantaged households receive better support. This is even more vital because inequalities in educational outcomes tend to last a long time, persisting across generations.

Our own simulations show that for the average district in East Africa, educational inequality would fall by around 15% if sorting between households and schools were fully eliminated and by up to 30% if sorting across communities were also cut to zero. Roughly speaking, this would be equivalent to cutting the magnitude of the intergenerational persistence of unequal education outcomes by more than half.

If decision-makers don’t act decisively to narrow within-country learning gaps, inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged students will become even more entrenched, making social mobility more difficult. Addressing these inequalities is vital to prevent children in the poorest communities from falling further behind.

The post Dual learning disadvantages in East Africa – and how to deal with them appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

The observed probabilities of dying in a terrorist attack are comparable to those of being killed by lightning. Yet among respondents to the World Values Survey in Europe and North America, 58% say that they are ‘worried’ about terrorist attacks. In Africa, this share is 74%, which is on a par with concerns about job loss or war. Such strong emotional reactions to relatively low frequency events are the result of deliberate tactics: terrorists aim to spread fear and disruption beyond the violent act itself.

Because of the intimidation strategies adopted by terrorists, the mere possibility of attacks happening might reduce schooling even without destroying infrastructure or killing civilians. While many studies have shown that various types of violence can suppress school enrolment or even attainment in many different settings (including Brazil, West Africa, East Africa, East Asia, and India), relatively little is known about the role of parents’ demand for education for their children in explaining this effect.

Exposure to mass media can be a powerful influence on a variety of socio-economic outcomes. Among these, radio or television can affect the educational outcomes of children either directly or, alternatively, by changing the role of women in the household, as seen in India and Cambodia.

Aside from any direct effect on education, media coverage can also propagate the negative impact of terrorist attacks on education by fuelling fears and stoking sentiments. As a report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) puts it: ‘Accusations of being the megaphone of terrorism to attract audiences weigh constantly on media, who are often operating on over-drive’.

Kenya is an ideal setting in which to study the relationships between terrorist attacks, media coverage, and education. The country is characterized by relatively patchy radio signal coverage, the main access to mass media. Moreover, parts of the country have experienced a stark increase in terrorist activity since the late 2000s, mainly in the northeastern parts of the country. Figure 1 shows the location and timing of these attacks.

Figure 1: Terrorist attacks in Kenya

Casualties of terrorist attacks                                           Terrorist attacks over time

The detrimental effect of terrorism on schooling is magnified by access to mass media. As Figure 2 shows, school enrolment decreases in the most affected parts of the country once terrorist attacks start.

More surprisingly, perhaps, the decrease in enrolment is much stronger for those children whose parents have radio signal coverage and thus access to radio. The difference is around 5 percentage points, a sizeable divergence, which suggests that the effect of terrorist attacks on schooling is indeed driven by parental demand, and that both awareness of terrorism and the subjective risks associated with it may play a role.

Figure 2: Terrorist attacks, schooling and radio-signal coverage

The number of media items on terrorism alone is negatively associated with school enrolment independently of actual attacks carried out. Terrorism in Kenya has attracted considerable media attention, as Figure 3 shows.

Relating the number of media items covering terrorism to enrolment in a specific region in Kenya shows that every 100 media mentions are associated with a decrease in attendance by 0.5 percentage points. Estimates suggest that every 100 media mentions have the same effect as one actual attack carried out. Unsurprisingly, these effects only hold for households with radio signal coverage. For households that do not have access to radio, there is no relationship between media coverage of terrorism and schooling.

Figure 3: Media coverage of terrorist attacks in Kenya

These findings highlight the importance of the salience of terrorism in the media as a channel that magnifies the already sizeable negative impact of terrorism on education. For the specific case of education choices, this is a channel that may well have lasting effects on socio-economic outcomes as well as demographic development.

Analysis of the exact location of attacks, children’s homes, and schools shows that attacks in close proximity to family residences have a particularly strong negative effect on education. But attacks have the most detrimental effect on schooling if they occur on the way to the nearest primary school.

Taken together, these results suggest that minimizing the negative effect of attacks on schooling requires a multifaceted approach.

On the one hand, the results on the significance of media coverage should be seen as a caution against sensationalism and in favor of moderate and facts-oriented reporting of terrorist events. UNESCO’s report makes useful suggestions for how journalists might report on terrorism.

On the other hand, the importance of the location of attacks suggests that providing children with fast, reliable, and secure transport to school may mitigate some of terrorism’s negative effects and help to boost enrolment in the face of terrorist attacks.

The post Media coverage of terrorism: magnifying the negative effect of attacks on schooling appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

The first one thousand days of life have shown to be crucial in determining both the physiological development of young children and their future economic success. Promoting early childhood development can therefore improve prospects for the achievement of broader social goals, such as sustainable development.

A large body of scientific evidence confirms that parenting is one of the strongest influences on early childhood development. Up to the age of three, children’s entire world is typically restricted to their homes, where the majority of interactions are with their families. In recognition of this, there has been a recent push in international policy towards the implementation of training programs that focus on parents as key agents of change.

A systematic review of research in this area, as well as recent empirical evidence, show that parents’ investments in and interactions with their children are key to better outcomes. At the same time, in a growing body of research on the economics of parenting, analysis has been modified to include parenting inputs as key elements in the production of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

Much of the existing evidence on early child development programs draws on interventions in advanced economies or middle-income developing countries with well-functioning welfare systems and far-reaching bureaucracies.

Evidence of the effects of early childhood parenting interventions in weaker institutional settings and among more vulnerable communities is limited – and knowledge about what interventions may work and can be scaled up in these challenging contexts is scarce.

This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa where the same kinds of programs used in high-income countries may be more difficult to implement for a variety of reasons – including budget constraints, lower levels of infrastructure, and less access to technology.

Improving knowledge about parenting

In a recent study, we show that in contexts where literacy levels among parents are very low, improving knowledge about parenting and acting on this knowledge can change parents’ practices and improve child wellbeing.

Early years interventions have focused primarily on supporting pre- and post-natal nutrition and ensuring access to critical maternal healthcare. But there is growing recognition that just providing these basic requirements is not enough.

An emerging body of research on early childhood development programs explores the effects of large cash transfers or nutrition interventions combined with the provision of information to parents. This work highlights the crucial role of the information component of the various interventions.

Our study confirms its importance by varying the combination and intensity of the training and information provided to parents. Importantly, it does so in a poor remote area of sub-Saharan Africa, exploring whether interventions that change parental behavior can be implemented in environments with real constraints on budgets, technology, and social infrastructure.

We evaluate the short- and medium-term impact of a unique early childhood parenting program, which was designed with a combination of novel components, and implemented among some of the poorest communities in the world in Rwanda.

Introducing First Steps

With support from the British Academy, the Institute of Development Studies and Save the Children embarked on a partnership in 2019 to evaluate and scale-up a holistic program called First Steps. The results of the evaluation are here.

The objective of First Steps is to enhance the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of parents to support the cognitive, physical, and socio-emotional development of their children up to the age of three. It is offered in Ngororero, one of Rwanda’s poorest districts, through weekly community meetings guided by local facilitators that support peer learning, aided by a radio program.

Over 17 weeks, the meetings and radio program focused on promoting simple activities, such as playing and talking with children, singing songs or telling stories, providing love and attention, naming objects and counting, matching things, and preparing healthy meals.

To avoid resorting to what might be perceived as patronizing lectures on how to be a good parent, a maximum of 20 parents in each village were organized into discussion groups and listened to a radio program exploring children’s development and parenting practices developed by Save the Children.

Understanding the project’s effect

To analyze the impact of First Steps, the five-month intervention was randomly assigned to three groups, composed of 27 villages each. A ‘light touch’ group listened to a weekly radio session and received support from a trained local facilitator with a basic package of training materials.

In the ‘full intervention’ group, the weekly meetings were paired with a local facilitator with a full package of training materials, a children’s book given to each family, and the support of a salaried facilitator, who conducted home visits. The third group was a control group.

In both intervention groups, the program had a positive impact 12 months later on three outcomes: children’s development, the time that parents spent with their children, and parents’ confidence in supporting their children’s development. Two and a half years later, the effects on the ‘full intervention’ group persisted.

Scaling it up

Is such an intervention scalable nationally, in terms of value-for-money and effect over time?

The cost was modest as the program uses the radio, which is an accessible technology in Ngororero. This is an innovative feature of the program in a context where literacy rates are very low. To our knowledge, First Steps is the first program implemented as a ‘randomized controlled trial’ in which group meetings included a live radio listening component seamlessly woven into the core meeting activities and built around the curriculum.

Although we are unable to isolate the effect of the radio program on its own, the mounting evidence of the effectiveness of radio and other media to promote social change and development suggests that the radio component may have contributed significantly to the large program impact we find.

First Steps also takes advantage of economies of scale by gathering parents in groups with trained facilitators drawn from the local community, rather than relying on individual family visits by trained social workers. Group-based programs are often less expensive than home visits. They encourage peer-to-peer learning and support, and have the potential to modify group norms with respect to child-raising and education. But the evidence is still mixed, and our study suggests that group meetings should possibly be accompanied by some home visits.

In terms of effects over time, changes in parents’ practices persist after almost three years. This is important because evaluations of similar programs have shown that improving parenting practices are key for the success and long-term sustainability of early child development interventions. Moreover, the positive contribution to a child’s development up to the age of five has been well documented to have positive long-term consequences in terms of health, education, and professional career later in life.

While this is no magic cost-effective pill to solve the challenges involved in ensuring that children living in vulnerable contexts achieve their full potential, interventions like First Steps show how simple solutions such as a radio program and group meetings with parents can improve children’s lives for the better, even in the world’s poorest communities.

Based on the First Steps intervention, and consistent with what might be expected from previous research, even low-cost interventions in parents’ interactions with their children can have big effects. In fact, they may be more worthwhile in low-income settings where every dollar spent has to count.

The post Changing the lives of very young children: evidence from Rwanda appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Informing and mobilizing parents has the potential to improve educational quality through increased bottom-up pressure: as service recipients, parents are in the best position to monitor schools and it is in their best interest to do so. To this end, many interventions have been implemented in developing countries in recent years, typically giving parents information on schools’ (or children’s) relative performance and/or ways for them to participate in the broader monitoring of teachers or the education process.

The results of these interventions are mixed, with significant impacts observed when parents are able to transfer their children to a different school, are trained to hold reading camps outside of school on a voluntary basis, receive information about local capture of primary school funds, or are given power in the context of school boards.

While investigations of the impact of information alone tend to document null effects (for example, as observed recently in Kenya), it is challenging to reach conclusions about the effectiveness of this type of intervention, as the kinds of information and the ways in which information is conveyed differ greatly across studies.

In fact, the body of research on early childhood interventions, which often employs parent information and mobilization strategies, offers a number of positive results (see the recent results for India).

Moreover, a small but growing evidence base on interventions conducted in developed countries to increase parents’ participation in children’s education finds optimistic results. Examples include parent meetings in French middle schools in disadvantaged areas, which aim to train parents in ways to help their children perform better at school, monetary incentives provided to parents in Chicago schools to attend parent academy sessions, and information conducive to better practices at home conveyed through text messages in San Francisco.

In recent work in Angola, we assess the effectiveness of an information and mobilization intervention that incorporates most of the elements of the information interventions previously implemented in the education sector in developing countries, while also borrowing features from early childhood interventions.

Parents in randomly selected primary schools were shown scorecards comparing the performance of the local school based on several metrics –teachers’ education and absence rates, school infrastructure and management practices, as well as pupils’ test scores – relative to other schools in the area.

In addition, parents were shown comics depicting desirable behaviors of parents and children at home and at school – a novel feature of our information intervention (see the excerpt in Figure 1). Moreover, similar to early childhood development programs, this Information intervention was conveyed in the most intensive way possible – that is, through one-to-one interactions during repeated monthly household visits over more than a full academic year.

Figure 1. Excerpt of comics (English translation)

Note: The full version of the comics and the scorecard can be found on the project website.

We also asked whether similar results could be obtained by letting relevant information emerge and circulate endogenously among parents during meetings where no external information is provided. To this end, we evaluated a second Meetings intervention, conducted in another set of randomly selected schools, where we organized and facilitated parent meetings where participants were invited to raise concerns about their children’s schools and jointly discuss possible solutions.

Finally, in a third intervention we implemented a combination of the first two interventions.

Our results show no evidence of improvements in pupil performance. But our analysis of heterogeneous effects finds that the interventions did raise performance but only in schools that were overall better at baseline, suggesting that it may take more time for worse than average schools to see changes in parental involvement (at home or at school) translate into better education outcomes.

The limited effects on student learning, in comparison with the positive results of a report card intervention in Pakistan, can be explained by the fragile education market in rural Angola. There are few ‘outside options’ for parents to choose from, let alone private schools, which greatly limits the bargaining power of parents.

More importantly, we find that all interventions were effective in mobilizing parents. But the Information intervention only affected parental involvement at home (for example, likelihood to help with homework), whereas the Meetings intervention increased parental participation at school (for example, the presence of parent representatives in the school board.

The intervention that combined information and parent meetings affected both dimensions of parental involvement, while also improving school infrastructures and management, parents’ satisfaction with teachers, and teachers’ attitudes toward parents.

Our results suggest that to mobilize parents at school, providing information is not enough, even when it is very comprehensive. Facilitating parent meetings seems to be necessary for that purpose, possibly due to the need for parents to develop ties allowing them to overcome collective action problems.

Having parent meetings with an open agenda may do the job while being much cheaper to implement relative to scorecard interventions. But combining parent meetings with high intensity dissemination of information seems to be needed to achieve improvements in school management and teaching.

The post Encouraging parents to be more involved in their children’s education appeared first on Globaldev Blog.