Can governments contract out school management at scale? In 2016 the Government of Punjab transferred management of over 4,000 failing primary schools to private operators. Schools remained free to students. Private operators received a government subsidy per enrolled student of less than half per-s...

The first section of this note examines the causes and consequences of Afghanistan’s financial crisis and lays out policy options the international community can support to enable urgent financial flows and restore the basic functioning of the Afghan financial system. The next section examines prosp...

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis continues to worsen, with the World Food Programme (WFP) reporting that 22.8 million people—more than half the country’s population—are projected to be acutely food insecure in 2022, including 8.7 million at risk of famine-like conditions. Even before the Taliban t...

How should governments and donors engage with the growing private sector in education in developing countries? Enrolment in private schools now exceeds 50 percent at the primary level in many major urban centres across Africa and Asia. Whilst the majority of these schools are small and independently...

This note summarizes two years of research under the Center for Global Development project “Governing Data for Development,” led by Michael Pisa and Ugonma Nwankwo along with project co-chairs Pam Dixon and Benno Ndulu. The project was funded by the Hewlett Foundation and guided by a ...

Foreign aid donors and international organizations supporting education in developing countries have increasingly coalesced around a policy agenda prioritizing foundational learning, measured by test scores in primary school, based on a diagnosis of deficient school quality, and a growing body of em...

Education systems regularly face unexpected school closures, whether due to disease outbreaks, natural disasters, or other adverse shocks. In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers using an RCT with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.