Lost Human Capital: Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement in Africa
Featuring
Tessa Bold, Assistant Professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies
Discussants
Jishnu Das, Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank
Host
Justin Sandefur, Senior Fellow at Center for Global Development
Can teacher quality explain the low learning levels observed in many African countries? Survey data spanning seven countries in sub-Saharan African shows that after four years of schooling, the majority of students fail to master tasks covered in the second year curriculum. In their new paper, Tessa Bold and her co-authors show these low learning levels can be partly explained by teachers’ limited knowledge of curriculum content. Many teachers struggle with tasks that their students should master in lower primary. If all students had been taught by teachers who had mastered the lower secondary curriculum, students would have acquired the equivalent of an additional three quarters of a year of schooling after four years, and the observed gap in effective education after four years would have been reduced by one third.
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Thursday, September 28
12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
Please bring your lunch; beverages will be provided.
Upcoming Events
AidEx is a two day event, which encompasses a conference, exhibition, meeting areas, awards and workshops. Its fundamental aim is to engage the sector at every level and provide a forum for aid & development professionals to meet, source, supply and learn. AidEx was created to help the international aid and development community engage the private sector in a neutral setting, drive innovation and support the ever-growing need for emergency aid and development programmes.
Over 1 billion women lack access to financial services due to economic and social barriers, time and mobility constraints, and discrimination Financial services delivered digitally can address these barriers. Closing the global gender gap in access to finance provides an opportunity for the private sector to reach an untapped and profitable market, and provides governments with an opportunity to better reach their constituents. This event looks at the recent evidence on which emerging technologies empower women economically, as well as the importance of cross-sectoral partnership and women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Center for Global Development, TechnoServe, and the World Bank are pleased to co-host this event in Dar es Salaam. We are committed to finding what works to promote women’s financial inclusion and are conducting innovative research on the potential of digital technologies. This event will launch new research on this topic and bring together leaders in the government and the private sector with experts in finance, development, and technology to have critical conversations on closing the financial gender gap. We hope you can join us.
With the goal of driving down drug costs, governments across the globe have instituted various forms of pharmaceutical price control policies. Understanding the impacts of such policies is particularly important in low- and middle-income countries, where lack of insurance coverage means that prices can serve as a barrier to access for patients and lack of effective quality control may allow for low-quality medicines in the market. In her paper, Emma Boswell Dean examines the theoretical effects of price controls in such markets and then measures the empirical effects of one implementation of pharmaceutical price controls, in which the Indian government placed price ceilings on a set of essential medicines.
The Center for Global Development, CDC Group, and the Centre for Finance and Development are pleased to invite you to the international conference Blended Development Finance and the New Industrial Policy on November 8-9, 2018 at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This unique conference is designed to convene both the new industrial policy thinkers, who have studied the history of government intervention, and blended finance practitioners, who are involved in setting up the institutions and procedures that will use official development finance to subsidise private enterprise in developing countries. These two communities too often work in isolation and have much to learn from each other.
The conference will combine scholar presentations with high-level policy discussions. Please see the preliminary programme for a list of sessions and speakers, in addition to more details about the conference.
Please join us for this “first of its kind” conference and feel free to share this invitation with your network and encourage your colleagues to attend. We want to reach as many people who work in private sector development as possible.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to sdf@cgdev.org if you have any questions. Free entrance. Registration required.
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