Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of humble leadership on project success. In addition, we examine the mediating effect of organisational learning on the relationship between humble leadership and the success of international development projects. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopted a quantitative research…

Addressing the equity and learning crisis in education requires resolute efforts to strengthen national systems. This includes efforts by development partners to improve development cooperation practices with more alignment of aid for education with national systems. Alignment provides unique opportunities to strengthen national systems for the…

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…

Data from sub-Saharan Africa show that many students leave school without the skills they need. To address this issue, it is important to understand what factors influence learning. According to the Heyneman and Loxley effect established in 1983, in low income countries school quality influences how much students learn more than those students'…

The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed concerns about how shocks may affect religious and other private schools in low-income countries, especially when they do not benefit from state support. By reducing parental incomes, shocks -- not only epidemics but also natural disasters and conflicts, reduce overall enrollment in school. But they may also lead…

In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two…

Research on the effects of mass schooling on social cleavages in Africa ignores descent-based hierarchies despite their affecting 218 million people on the continent. In contrast, I show how pursuit of social mobility and honor to overcome descent-based discrimination underpinned Haalpulaar parents' and youths' engagement with secondary school in…

This study investigates the impact of higher education on economic growth and is based on a sample of 18 African economies over the time period 1980-2015. The research makes use of a Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) framework to account for potential dynamic and endogenous relationship in modelling of the tertiary education-growth nexus. The…

This paper is the second in a set of two on the extent to which Catholic and other faith-based schools are serving the poor well. Catholic and other faith-based schools reach millions of children who live in poverty, yet this does not necessarily mean that they are serving these children well enough. The paper considers two separate issues. First,…

Since the onset of COVID-19, governments have launched technology-supported education interventions to ensure children learn. This paper offers a narrative synthesis of emerging evidence on technology-based education to understand the current experiences of learners, teachers and families. Studies find that few students in low- and middle-income…

PISA for Development (PISA-D) aims to make the assessment more accessible and relevant to low- and middle-income countries. This report summarises findings from the out-of-school assessment results for PISA-D. By combining the out-of-school assessment with the in-school assessment, PISA-D has been able to achieve a unique perspective on the…

The PISA for Development (PISA-D) project aims to make PISA more accessible and relevant to middle- and low-income countries by introducing new features to the assessment, including tests that are specially designed to measure lower levels of performance, contextual questionnaires that better reflect the situations of 15-year-olds across a diverse…

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…

Whereas the sample composition biases of web surveys have been discussed extensively for developed countries, studies for developing countries are scarce. This article helps to fill that gap by comparing similar non-probability-based web surveys (WEB) and probability-based face-to-face (F2F) surveys both to each other and to the labor force. An…

Building on the experience of working with middle-income countries in PISA since 2000, and in an effort to respond to the emerging demand for PISA to cater to a wider range of countries, the OECD launched the PISA for Development (PISA-D) initiative in 2014. This one-off pilot project, spanning six years, aims to make the assessment more…