Across several African countries, there has been a troubling trend of infrastructure being stripped to sell as scrap metal. People have been arrested for ripping out and selling rail sleepers in South Africa and Ghana, pylon and copper wires in Uganda, and streetlamp meters in Liberia. That strippin...

Exam data are closely guarded and there is very little research from lower-income countries on how exams influence educational or economic outcomes. Our new database on public examinations begins to fill this gap.

Each year over two million secondary-school students across English-speaking West Africa sit coordinated exams, with the explicit goal of maintaining consistent educational standards across schools and over time. We find that scores across math items drawn from different exam years—when taken by an ...

As the Biden administration turns its attention to infrastructure legislation in the United States, it is important to focus on the role investment in infrastructure financing can play in the recovery. This note covers a policy proposal for a credit enhancement instrument, using concessional financi...

In this note, I discuss a new approach to how national administrative education data—records of school census, public exams, school inspection, teacher payroll, and other operational matters, collected on routine basis—are integrated, shared, and used to generate knowledge.

Most governments around the world have temporarily closed schools in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As they start to plan for reopening, we have compiled a series of short and accessible briefs that provide the best available rigorous evidence on five critical dimensions ...