From the early days of national independence in 1975, the central aim of the educational policy in Mozambique has been to ensure that all school-age children have access to school and can remain there until they have completed their basic education. In the pursuit of this aim, the extension of...

This ethnographic study explores the implementation of bilingual education in Mozambique: how it is understood, adapted, and resisted by school directors, teachers, and local officials. Bilingual education uses local languages in early grades before a gradual shift into Portuguese, which most...

In order to correct for the initial gender blindness of the Paris Declaration and related aid modalities as general and sector budget support, it has been proposed to integrate a gender dimension into budget support entry points. This paper studies the effectiveness of (joint) gender working...

I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1-5 schools with grade 6-10 schools to create grade 1-10 'model' schools. Twenty-three...

We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: first, supply-side capability interventions that...

Raising schooling quality in low-income countries is a pressing challenge. Substantial research has considered the impact of cutting class sizes on skills acquisition. Considerably less attention has been given to the extent to which peer effects, which refer to class composition, also may...

This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that Rawlsian principles of social justice, human rights...

Efforts to tackle discrimination in access to basic services have shown mixed results in different country settings. This study examines the positive and negative outcomes attributed to anti-discrimination measures adopted in different country contexts and analyses the factors contributing to...

Vocational training programmes, like South Africa's learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth unemployment. This paper uses a longitudinal...