Experimental evidence on scaling up education reforms in Kenya

By T. Bold, M. Kimenyi, G. Mwabu, A. Ng’ang’a, J. Sandefur. Journal of Public Economics, 2018

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity and the neglect of political economy. We investigate these concerns in a randomized trial designed to assess the prospects for scaling-up a contract teacher intervention in Kenya, previously shown to raise test scores for primary students in Western Kenya and various locations in India. The intervention was implemented in parallel in all eight Kenyan provinces by a non-governmental organization (NGO) and the Kenyan government. Institutional differences had large effects on contract teacher performance. We find a significant, positive effect of 0.19 standard deviations on math and English scores in schools randomly assigned to NGO implementation, and zero effect in schools receiving contract teachers from the Ministry of Education. We discuss political economy factors underlying this disparity, and suggest the need for future work on scaling up proven interventions to work within public sector institutions. ∗We are indebted to the staff of the Ministry of Education, the National Examination Council, and World Vision Kenya, and in particular to Mukhtar Ogle and Salome Ong’ele for their leadership throughout the process. We acknowledge the financial support of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the “Improving Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth” (iiG) research consortium, the International Growth Centre (IGC), and the PEP-AUSAID Policy Impact Evaluation Research Initiative (PIERI). The views expressed here are the authors’ alone. †Bold: Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University and Goethe University Frankfurt, tessa.bold@iies.su.se. Kimenyi: Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., kimenyi@brookings.edu. Mwabu: Department of Economics, University of Nairobi, gmwabu@gmail.com. Ng’ang’a: Strathmore University, Nairobi, alicemnganga@yahoo.com. Sandefur: Center for Global Development, Washington D.C., jsandefur@cgdev.org.

Subfields: Education, Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1425127fee3a3a76ecb00099f67467666fdc80f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

In Political Science and International Relations

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units (2020, methodology): “Finally, the paper is related to the literature on scaling RCT evidence (Banerjee and Duflo, 2009; Allcott, 2015; Bold et al., 2018; Dehejia, Pop-Eleches, and Samii, 2019; Meager, 2019a; Vivalt, 2020).”
What Do Teachers Know and Do? Does it Matter? Evidence from Primary Schools in Africa (2017, background): “18 See, for example, Duflo et al., 2015; Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2013, Bold et al., 2016.”
Optimality of Matched-Pair Designs in Randomized Controlled Trials (2022, background): “For examples in this spirit of small strata, see Bold et al. (2018) and Brown and Andrabi (2020).”