Education

For the first time, the elderly, urban populations, and women of reduced fertility outnumber their counterparts. Joel E. Cohen discusses how changing demographic trends will require a heavier focus on primary and secondary education, reproductive health and demographically sensitive urban planning.

Cynthia B. Lloyd, Ruth Levine, and Miriam Temin, authors of reports in CGD’s Girls Count series, call on Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, to push for global and national action to increase the commitment and funding to support adolescent girls’ education. Increasing girls’ chances of...

In this essay, visiting fellow Desmond Bermingham describes the framework for a better “global education compact” between donor and recipient nations and four possible arrangements to mobilize and allocate development assistance for education. He highlights the advantages and disadvantages of...

Efforts to decentralize educational systems often arouse fears that the quality of schooling will become less equal as a result. But what’s the evidence? CGD non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett and co-author Martina Viarengo show in a new CGD working paper that the supposedly greater equality of...

This working paper examines the relationship between high inequality and liberalization of the financial sector in Latin America from 1975 to 2000. Using panel data, the authors find that increases in financial liberalization were associated with bank crises and other domestic and external shocks,...

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. President Barack Obama are both committed to boosting funding for global education. CGD visiting fellow Desmond Bermingham, the former head of the Education for All–Fast Track Initiative, offers suggestions about making the most of additional U.S....

The debate on user fees in health and education has been contentious, but until recently much of the evidence has been anecdotal. Does charging poor people for health and education services improve or impede access? CGD non-resident fellow Michael Kremer and co-author Alaka Holla survey the...

The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President shows how modest changes in U.S. policies could greatly improve the lives of poor people in developing countries, thus fostering greater stability, security, and prosperity globally and at home. Center for Global...

Improving education has been a central goal of international development for decades, and the best indicators of improvement measure student performance. But can such measurements be used as incentives to stimulate more rapid improvement in education? There are no simple answers to this question...

Although higher education is crucial to development remarkably little is known about what happens within developing country universities. Moreover, while enrollment and budgets are rising, the impact of this growth is unclear. A new CGD working paper by non-resident fellow Devesh Kapur and...

The wellbeing of adolescent girls in developing countries shapes global economic and social prosperity -- yet girls' needs often are consigned to the margins of development policies and programs. This new report describes why and how to provide adolescent girls in developing countries a full and...

One story popular in development circles tells how Uganda slashed corruption simply by publicly disclosing the amount of monthly grants to schools--thus making it harder for officials to siphon off money for their own enrichment. This working paper finds that while the percentage of funds being...

Girls have achieved remarkable increases in primary schooling over the past decade, yet millions are still not in school. In Inexcusable Absence, CGD visiting fellows Maureen Lewis and Marlaine Lockheed reported the startling new finding that nearly three-quarters of out-of-school girls belong to...

Remarkable increases in primary schooling over the past decade have brought gender equity to the education systems of many poor countries. But some 60 million girls are still not attending school. In this CGD brief, non-resident fellow Maureen Lewis and visiting fellow Marlaine Lockheed explain...

Treating poverty-stricken AIDS patients with antiretrovirals (ARVs) extends their lives and enables them to retun to work. It seems reasonable to expect that their children would benefit, too. Now there is research to support this idea. CGD post-doctoral fellow Harsha Thirumurthy and his co-authors...

Girls' education is widely recognized as crucial to development. Yet there has been surprisingly little hardheaded analysis about what is keeping girls out of school, and how to overcome these barriers. In Inexcusable Absence, Maureen Lewis and Marlaine Lockheed present new research showing that...

The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seek to ensure that all children complete primary school by 2015. But school completion rates don't tell us how much--or how little--the kids actually learn. This new working paper co-authored by CGD non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett shows that even in...

Given all the other pressing worries, why was education among the issues that G8 leaders discussed at the St. Petersburg Summit? Education and the Developing World, a CGD Rich World/Poor World Brief, explains why investing in education is not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do....

Many poor countries, especially in Africa, will miss the MDGs by a large margin. But neither African inaction nor a lack of aid will necessarily be the reason. Instead, responsibility for near-certain ‘failure’ lies with the overly-ambitious goals themselves and unrealistic expectations placed...

This CGD brief is based on the book From Social Assistance to Social Development: Targeted Education Subsidies in Developing Countries, by Samuel Morley and David Coady.

"No Child Left Behind" could move from a national program to a global mission if several current policies and initiatives converge: the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account, and the renewed declarations of the Bush administration, supported by U.S. public...

Education is an end in itself, a human right, and a vital part of the capacity of individuals to lead lives they value. It gives people in developing countries the skills they need to improve their own lives and to help transform their societies. Women and men with better education earn more...

This paper is part of the Copenhagen Consensus process, which aims to assess and evaluate the opportunities available to address the ten largest challenges facing the world. One of these ten challenges is the “lack of education.” This paper provides an analytical framework to evaluate the...

*REVISED Version September 2004 The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. Many countries making...

This work quantifies how long it has taken countries rich and poor to make the transition towards high enrollments and gender parity. It finds that many countries that have not raised enrollments fast enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals have in fact raised enrollments extraordinarily...

The book compiles a vast amount of unpublished and published material on existing CTE programs and their impact on poverty. Groundbreaking case studies and detailed evaluations of programs in Mexico, Brazil, Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Chile add up to an unusual and surprising success...

This paper outlines the likely effects of the AIDS pandemic in Africa on the continent's ability to produce education and use it effectively for growth and poverty reduction.

At the end of the 1990s the future of Latin America seemed grim in the face of four devastating problems—slow and unsteady economic growth, persistent poverty, social injustice, and personal insecurity. For 10 years Latin America had pursued—with considerable vigor—the 10 economic policies...