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...

Media coverage and country-level studies have highlighted violence—including sexual and physical abuse—against girls in schools as an important problem in need of immediate attention. This study characterizes rates of physical and sexual violence against adolescent girls and compares rates of violen...

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...

How did children learn while schools were closed during 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers, using a randomized controlled trial with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.

Students around the world lack foundational literacy and numeracy skills at striking rates. This essay examines the potential channels by which FLN investments and skills—which most systems teach in the early grades of primary school—may impact later schooling and subsequent life outcomes and t...

In this article, we draw on our pilot testing of phone-based assessments in Botswana, along with the existing literature on oral testing of reading and mathematics, to propose a series of preliminary practical lessons to guide researchers and service providers as they try phone-based learning assess...