Experimental evidence on scaling up education reforms in Kenya

Bold, Tessa; Kimenyi, Mwangi S.; Mwabu, Germano; Ng’ang’a, Alice; Sandefur, Justin

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.08.007

Cited by 132 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In Kenya, Bold et al. () compare results from similar educational interventions implemented by NGOs and the government and find children's learning outcomes differ substantially. The same principle may hold for the agricultural sector.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of the use of new technologies on farmers’ wheat yield in Ethiopia: evidence from a randomized control trial

Abate

Bernard

Brauw

et al. 2018

Agricultural Economics

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In 2013, Ethiopia's Agricultural Transformation Agency introduced the Wheat Initiative to increase smallholder productivity. In this article, we measure the impacts of the Wheat Initiative package of technologies, and its marketing assistance component alone, on yields among a promotional group of farmers. The package includes improved techniques, improved inputs, and a guaranteed market for the crop. Relying on crop‐cut measures and farmers’ own assessments, we find that full package led to an average 14% higher yields. Implementation of the Wheat Initiative was successful in making certified seed and fertilizer accessible to farmers and increasing their uptake, though only 61% of the intervention group adopted row planting and few farmers received marketing assistance. The measured yield difference may underestimate the true yield difference associated with the technology because of incomplete adoption of the recommended practices by intervention farmers and adoption of some practices by control farmers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of the use of new technologies on farmers’ wheat yield in Ethiopia: evidence from a randomized control trial

Abate

Bernard

Brauw

et al. 2018

Agricultural Economics

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“…In particular, we demonstrate how solutions from applied research that is tied to the places, populations, and programmes associated with specific NGOs may have very different impacts when implemented in alternative settings (Ravallion 2009). 3 Our study is also related to a growing literature on the role of implementer identity, which finds that NGO-led interventions are generally more effective than comparable efforts by other actors (Bold et al 2016;Cameron and Shah 2017;Grossman et al 2016;Henderson and Lee 2015). Yet such comparisons implicitly assume that there is something inherently different about NGOs that leads to implementation effectiveness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…For this, we focus on two existing randomized evaluations. First, we turn to Bold et al (2016), who evaluate a nationwide education reform in Kenya that expanded funding for hiring 'contract teachers'. Such teachers are hired directly by schools-typically at wages that are below those offered to tenured public school teachers-to address teacher shortages; they are also not accorded the same tenure protections available to their civil-service colleagues.…”

Section: Bayesian Synthesis Of the Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 Nevertheless, we recognize that ours is not the only study grappling with these questions, and that there are tangible opportunities for us to incorporate lessons from this broader literature on the importance of implementer identity. To evaluate the relative strength of the evidence we uncover, we use estimates from Bold et al (2016) and Cameron and Shah (2017)-who compare the effectiveness of an NGO-led intervention to a government-led one-to formally specify a distribution for our prior understanding of the effects NGOs might have on final outcomes. How does our study contribute to this prior knowledge?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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NGOs and the effectiveness of interventions

Usmani¹,

Jeuland²,

Pattanayak³

2018

WIDER Working Paper

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“…Evidence of accountability reforms in developing countries is more scarce, and is dominated by evaluations of pilot programs of teacher performance pay systems (Glewwe et al, 2010;Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2011) or bottom-up accountability mechanisms (Banerjee et al, 2010;Lieberman et al, 2014). A potential drawback of these pilot studies is that the nature of their implementation-and, consequently, the incentives they create-may be very different when implemented by government at scale, and, more broadly, the estimates they deliver may fail to capture general equilibrium effects (Bold et al, 2018;Muralidharan and Niehaus, 2017). Unfortunately, larger-scale reforms have often not been evaluated due to lack of a suitable control group (Bruns et al, 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

Can Public Rankings Improve School Performance?

2020

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In 2013, Tanzania introduced "Big Results Now in Education", a low-stakes accountability program that published both nationwide and within-district school rankings. Using data from the universe of school performance from 2011-2016, we identify the impacts of the reform using a difference-in-differences estimator that exploits the differential pressure exerted on schools at the bottom of their respective district rankings. We find that BRN improved learning outcomes for schools in the bottom two deciles of their districts. However, the program also led schools to strategically exclude students from the terminal year of primary school. JEL Classification: I21, I25, I28, O15 This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) and is freely available online at: http://jhr.uwpress.orgSchool performance rankings based on standardized tests are typically used as the foundation of accountability systems. Such systems are thought to be more effective if school performance is used to sanction or reward schools (Hanushek and Raymond, 2005). However, there are concerns that such "high-stakes" systems can encourage unintended behaviors, including gaming, teaching to the test, and neglecting unrewarded tasks or academic subjects (Baker, 2002(Baker, , 1992 Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). Further, political constraints, such as opposition from teachers, make these systems difficult to implement. As a result, the first accountability systems that are implemented tend to be "low-stakes" systems that simply focus on publicizing information about school performance. 1 Although successful low-stakes accountability reforms have taken place in contexts when parents are willing and able to act on the information provided to them (Andrabi et al., 2017;Camargo et al., 2018; Koning and van der Wiel, 2012), these systems may also be effective if they create sufficient reputational pressure for higher-level education administrators or school staff (Bruns et al., 2011; Figlio and Loeb, 2011). But such pressure could be a double-edged sword, encouraging the same distortions and perverse behaviors that are associated with high-stakes systems.In this paper, we study the intended and unintended consequences of a nationwide accountability system implemented in Tanzania in 2012. In response to growing concerns about school quality, the Government of Tanzania instituted a package of reforms that were branded "Big Results Now in Education" (BRN) (World Bank, 2018b). The BRN education program was a flagship reform that was overseen and coordinated by the Office of the President and implemented by the Ministry of Education. It aimed to improve the quality of education in Tanzania through a series of top-down accountability measures that leveraged the political prominence of the reforms to pressure bureaucrats in the education system.A key BRN policy was its school ranking initiative, under which the central government disseminated information about individual primary scho...

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Experimental evidence on scaling up education reforms in Kenya

Cited by 132 publications

References 25 publications

The impact of the use of new technologies on farmers’ wheat yield in Ethiopia: evidence from a randomized control trial

The impact of the use of new technologies on farmers’ wheat yield in Ethiopia: evidence from a randomized control trial

NGOs and the effectiveness of interventions

Can Public Rankings Improve School Performance?

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