Education in Africa: What Are We Learning?
By David K. Evans, Amina Mendez Acosta. 2020
183 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Countries across Africa continue to face major challenges in education. In this review, we examine 142 recent empirical studies (from 2014 onward) on how to increase access to and improve the quality of education across the continent, specifically examining how these studies update previous research findings. We find that more than half of the studies evaluate government implemented programs, about one-third include detailed cost analysis, and one quarter evaluate multiple treatment arms. We identify several areas where new studies provide rigorous evidence on topics that do not figure prominently in earlier evidence syntheses. New evidence shows promising impacts of structured pedagogy interventions (which typically provide a variety of inputs, such as lesson plans and training for teachers together with new materials for students) and of mother tongue instruction interventions, as well as from a range of teacher programs, including both remunerative (pay-for-performance of various designs) and non-remunerative (coaching and certain types of training) programs. School feeding delivers gains in both access and learning. New studies also show long-term positive impacts of eliminating school fees for primary school and positive impacts of eliminating fees in secondary school. Education technology interventions have decidedly mixed impacts, as do school grant programs and programs providing individual learning inputs (e.g., uniforms or textbooks). www.cgdev.org David K. Evans and Amina Mendez Acosta
Subfields: Demography, Education, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e65244ca850737ff8838a0500d0a413e4b77a63
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Citations in the corpus
- Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum: New Opportunities to Inform Policy (2021, background): “Increasing research shows that initial literacy instruction in a language with which students are already familiar (e.g., their native tongue) is most effective (Evans & Mendez Acosta, 2021b; Piper, Zuilkowski, & Ong’ele, S, 2016).”