This paper reviews what has been learned over many decades of foreign aid to education. It discusses what works and what does not and in this discussion draws attention to the fact that even a simple assessment requires more than providing a uniform check-list of inputs. It shows the positive...

Education is associated with a range of positive micro and macro effects. It is hence no surprise that donors have recently increased the amount of official development aid specifically focused on restoring and maintaining education in less-developed states. While much attention has been paid to...

There is a growing interest in the debate on aid effectiveness for assessing the impact of aid not only on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also on intermediate outcomes such as health and education. This paper reviews evidence from recent in-depth country work on the impact of...

Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty reduction: helping the poor earn more in the...

This paper examines peer effects on students' gender norm perceptions and skills formation. I use a Uruguayan nationally representative survey of 9th grade students and exploit the quasi-random variation in the proportion of female peers across classes within schools for causal identification....

This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for health and education by new oil and gas revenues,...

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to post one of the highest gender gaps in educational outcomes in the world. Gender gaps in educational outcomes might be attributed to an uneven allocation of household resources towards the schooling of boys and girls. In this paper, we interrogate this issue using...

Today it is widely acknowledged that increasing the gender sensitivity of development aid increases its effectiveness. This report evaluates the extent to which the World Bank integrates gender concerns into its policies and investments, pointing out structural, financial and policy gaps that...

Economic, social, and political inequalities are at the forefront of today's public debate. While governments around the world have made conscious efforts to promote social inclusion, and major progress in fulfilling basic needs has been witnessed during the last decades, certain groups of...

This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China's shift in focus from 'quantity' to 'quality', and evidencebased guidelines for effective implementation of India's New Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). The divergent...