Prioritizing Educational Investments in Children in the Developing World

Abstract

We bring together 40 randomized and non-randomized evaluations of education programs to compare cost-effectiveness, seeking to facilitate prioritization of different candidate interventions by policymakers. We examine cost-effectiveness across three outcomes (enrollment, attendance, and test scores) and find distinct "best interventions" for each outcome. For increasing enrollment, urban fellowships, school consolidation, and extra teachers have proven most cost effective. For school attendance, school-based deworming stands out as most cost effective. And for improving test scores, several interventions seem similarly cost effective, including providing blackboards, workbooks, training teachers, and others. We discuss some of the challenges inherent to comparing interventions. _______________________________________________________________________ Acknowledgments:We are grateful for financial support from the RAND Corporation. We especially thank Lynn Karoly for helpful comments on the paper and Rachel Glennerster for helpful conversations, as well as the authors of many of the cited papers for additional cost information not available in the published versions of their papers. All errors are our own.

The heterogeneous impact of conditional cash transfers

“…These are in the lower range of similarly-calculated cost-effectiveness ratios for interventions aimed at increasing enrollment (Evans and Ghosh, 2008). We also find substantial heterogeneity by the stratifying variable of mean municipal height-for-age, with full-sample effects accounted for by municipalities in the 2 poorest experimental blocks.…”

Mass deworming to improve developmental health and wellbeing of children in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and network meta-analysis

“…1 Mass deworming of children has been described as the most cost-effective strategy to improve educational attendance in endemic helminth countries. 2 Although deworming is inexpensive (US$0•50) per child, 3 the global cost of implementing the WHO recom mendations for all children is estimated to be $276 million annually. 4 A 2015 Cochrane review 5 concluded that mass deworming does not improve child health or school performance; however, concerns have been raised that the review did not sufficiently address a number of methodological issues that might have influenced its conclusions.…”

Can Mobile Phones Improve Learning? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Niger

“…Yet the successes of these initiatives have been 33 While this compares favourably to other interventions, such as those surveyed in Evans and Ghosh (2008), these effects are not directly comparable as they focus mostly on inschool interventions. Moreover, there is a trade-off between the more immediate returns on interventions targeted towards adults versus the shorter duration during which they accrue (due to the shorter remaining life expectancy).…”