In the 60-plus year history of returns to investment in education estimates, there have been several compilations in the literature. This paper updates Psacharopoulos and Patrinos and reviews the latest trends and patterns based on 1120 estimates in 139 countries from 1950 to 2014. The private average global return to a year of schooling is 9% a…

Fifty-three percent of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in low- and middle-income countries despite an investment of between 33-49% of education expenditure on primary education. Teaching children to read in the early grades is fundamental to building resilient education systems, as the ability to read early in life is a great predictor…

Free and compulsory primary education remains a priority area in the international policy perspective, starting from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 to the formulation of Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Under the impact of globalization, an impressive expansion in the access to primary education has been observed in recent…

Sub-Saharan African countries have realized that the biggest challenge facing their education system was not enrollment deficit as they were led to believe for many decades. Rather, it was the lack of appropriate technology that left them behind and widened the education gap between Western and African countries. In Senegal, much progress has been…

This summary of the "UNICEF Strategic Plan, 2018-2021" highlights the organization's key goals and activities, setting out the concrete results that UNICEF aims to achieve for children with its partners over a four-year period. The summary also outlines the organizational change strategies and enablers envisioned by the Strategic Plan to…

This paper highlights patterns in school enrollment indicators that affect the efficiency and effectiveness of education systems in a set of low-income countries: those that have expanded access quickly in the last decade or two, but have not yet absorbed that expansion efficiently. Although the patterns in these indicators are observable in the…

In this dissertation, I present three distinct essays in economics of education and health economics that can be read independently from one another. These studies investigate the non-pecuniary benefits of extended primary schooling in a developing country setting. I exploit the 1997 education reform in Republic of Turkey, which extended the…

India's "Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009" compels private schools to reserve a proportion of their seats for free for disadvantaged children. Although controversial, it is idealized as an equity measure for inclusion in and through education. This small-scale study, feeding into a larger research project,…

Access to books is key to learning to read and sustaining a love of reading. Yet many low- and middle-income countries struggle to provide their students with reading materials of sufficient quality and quantity. Since 2008, RTI International has provided technical assistance in early reading assessment and instruction to ministries of education…

Earlier studies of educational effectiveness in resource-constrained countries tended to focus on fiscal and material resources. However, the impact thereof can be limited where effective processes at the school and classroom levels are not present. Using hierarchical linear modelling, this study draws on SACMEQ data to generate an effective…

Education researchers working in sub-Saharan Africa have recently and rapidly expanded the availability of evidence related to the impact of educational interventions on learning outcomes, particularly in preprimary and lower primary education (Ganimian & Murnane, 2016; McEwan, 2015; Popova, Evans, & Arancibia, 2016). Awareness that…

For education reform to move beyond policy rhetoric and find a place in teachers' practice, the critical role of teachers must be acknowledged. Moving beyond a focus on the "what" of educational reform to the "how", this study explores the enabling conditions for implementing learner-centred education in the Maldives. Using…

Despite the multiple meta-analyses documenting the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and achievement, none have examined this question outside of English-speaking industrialized countries. This study is the first meta-analytic effort, to the best of our knowledge, to focus on developing countries. Based on 49 empirical studies…

This cluster randomized controlled trial tested the impact of school-only and lifewide-learning (LWL) approaches to supporting early-grade learning over 2 years in rural Rwanda. We compare school-only and LWL treatments with a business-as-usual control condition and with each other. Schools in both treatment groups received reading materials and…

Good education changes lives. It is therefore unsurprising that improved schooling plays a central part in most development strategies. At the same time, the expansion of school attainment alone is not sufficient to guarantee improved welfare. This open access book focuses on one country in West Africa, Togo, to explore what a country that has…