Interest in scaling promising innovations to effect systemic change in education around the world has grown over the last decade. The work of scaling education innovations (up, out, down, and into deep and lasting impact) has always required nimble attention to the unpredictability of implementation. Much has been written about the need for…

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality "girl-friendly" primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20 percentage points and increased their test…

Household income has been shown to matter for children's school enrolment, in particular in settings where households face tight liquidity constraints caused by the lack of insurance and limited possibilities to smooth consumption through credit and savings. However, so far only few studies have made an effort to quantify the income elasticity of…

The future of bilateral aid to basic education is at risk, placing the educational opportunities of many of the world's poorest girls and boys on the line. Some donor governments are reducing overall bilateral assistance, others are phasing out long-standing partnerships with particular developing countries and several are abandoning education as…

Using data I collected in Africa, this paper examines a household's decision to adjust its size through child fostering, an institution where biological parents temporarily send children to live with other families. Households experiencing negative idiosyncratic income shocks, child gender imbalances, located further from primary schools, or with…

The BRIGHT program was designed to improve the educational outcomes of children in Burkina Faso. It focused on girls in particular and was implemented in 132 rural villages throughout the 10 provinces of the country in which girls' enrollment rates were lowest. It consisted of constructing primary schools with three classrooms and implementing a…

This booklet provides an introduction to the educational policy-making process for both experienced and new planners. Policy is defined as decisions designed to guide future decisions or to initiate and guide the implementation of previous decisions. Case studies of Burkina Faso, Jordan, Peru, and Thailand show how educational policy has played…