Despite increases in school enrolment, the world is facing a global learning crisis that suggests a trade-off between the quantity and quality of education.
This case study from Ghana examines whether there has been a long-term change in educational outcomes, measured by population literacy and numeracy rates, in the decades following the implementation of a national free compulsory basic education policy. It further determines whether there are variations by level of education in the changes over time.
This study used nationally representative repeated cross-sectional data from two Ghana Living Standards Surveys (2006 and 2017) to estimate basic literacy and numeracy.
At the same level of education for the primary and lower secondary school levels, literacy and numeracy were lower in the latter period than a decade previously. These findings suggest that the expansion in gross enrolment at the primary and lower secondary school levels has been associated with a long-term decline in the quality of education.
Considering these findings, it is crucial to consider the long-term implications of expanding access to education on the quality of the education provided. These findings highlight the need for increased investment in quality education to complement the increase in access. This would ensure that children acquire foundational skills at the basic education level. Failure to maintain quality alongside expanded access could negatively impact workforce productivity, economic growth, and social equality.
What explains the fact that the humanitarian response in some crises is well funded, while other humanitarian emergencies are largely neglected? The literature identifies three groups of factors that influence aid allocations: needs in recipient countries, donor countries' interests, and agenda setting driven by media coverage; although there is debate over how relatively important these are.
This study tests existing theory by adding three novel aspects.
First, rather than just measuring the amount of money available, we consider the share of funding that is provided against the stated requirements. Second, we measure humanitarian needs in a more detailed way than has typically been the case. Third, we use datasets that have been underutilized in the academic literature.
By using these three novel approaches, we confirm that all three factors—humanitarian needs, strategic interests, agenda setting—play a role. However, the most consistent factor is media coverage. We are also able to distinguish between different dimensions of need: the number of hosted refugees makes a difference, but the number of displaced people does not. We find that countries with the worst human rights situations attract lower funding levels and more democratic countries attract more funding.
Donors should consider how the factors identified in this study influence their funding decisions in the aggregate. They should be aware of how media coverage may influence their allocations of humanitarian funding. Journalists should be aware of potential biases in their reporting on humanitarian emergencies. Aid agencies should consider counteracting the factors that are associated with underfunded emergencies.
The climate crisis threatens the livelihoods and welfare of farmers in the global south. Increasing variability of weather makes it ever more important to get forecasts to farmers and help them make best use of this information. Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) is an approach that gives farmers better weather forecasts and, in lockstep with agricultural extension workers, supports farmers in interpreting forecasts to make appropriate decisions for their own farms. It has been implemented across more than 20 countries of the global south, including Malawi.
Reviews and evaluations of PICSA have been positive, although it has not previously been rigorously evaluated using impact evaluation techniques.
We estimate the impacts of PICSA training and meetings on lead farmers in Malawi, taking farmers in four districts where PICSA operated, and farmers in four other districts where the programme was not present.
We compare outcomes in farming practice, yields obtained, livelihood decisions and food security between lead farmers who participated in PICSA and those who did not. Because selection into the programme was not random, we use propensity score matching and regression adjustment to correct for potential selection bias.
PICSA lead farmers used seasonal forecasts to plan farm decisions, change crop activities, increase maize yields, and improve their food security. Differences between them and the control group were, in most cases, significant.
Our results confirm the potential of PICSA to help farmers adapt to climate change.
In similar contexts, the PICSA approach could effectively support smallholders to make informed agricultural decisions, in participatory discussions, based on climate and weather information.
For Malawi, the evidence suggests the programme or something similar should be continued.
The level of financial inclusion has increased markedly in Namibia in recent years. Currently, 78% of the population is considered to be financially included. More importantly, this increase has largely derived from vulnerable groups, including low-income earners living in rural areas. Although there has been an increase in the rate of financial literacy, there is no formal empirical analysis showing the extent to which improved access to formal financial services is associated with financial literacy.
This article deepens the empirical analysis of financial literacy by simultaneously considering their effects on savings, bank account ownership, and access to credit and insurance in Namibia. We further disaggregated the analysis to consider heterogeneity between men and women, as well as between rural and urban populations.
We used data from the Namibia Financial Inclusion Survey of 2017 and the instrumental variable probit model to minimize the bias from possible endogeneity caused by potential measurement error, unobserved variable bias, or reverse causality.
The study showed that financial literacy significantly increases the likelihood of people using formal financial products. Failure to adequately control for the associated bias would lead to substantial overestimation of the impact of financial literacy. Estimates from the disaggregated analysis showed that the impact of financial literacy differs significantly between rural and urban populations, as well as between men and women. The effects are higher for males than for females and for rural than urban sub-samples.
The positive effect of financial literacy on formal financial products suggests that policy options that promote financial literacy are crucial for improving access to formal financial products, particularly for men and the rural population. These policies could include the introduction of financial literacy programmes in schools in order to enhance personal financial knowledge and participation in the formal financial sector. Emphasis should be placed on the raising of awareness, especially among disadvantaged communities, as to the benefits of owning and operating different financial products and on the inclusion of financial literacy programmes on public television.
When collecting evidence from the field, the quality of the data determines the reliability of the analysis. When data are collected in the field by enumerators, the latter's performance needs to be monitored to avoid errant behaviour that could compromise data quality.
We show how paradata on the process of data collection itself can improve enumerator performance, using a household survey in India as a case study.
We conducted action research to improve data quality in the India Working Study conducted in early 2020 in Karnataka and Rajasthan. We designed indicators (flags) from the paradata to mark potential deviant enumerator behaviour in the early stages of the survey. Flagged enumerators were contacted by supervisors who provided constructive feedback. We then measured the performance of the flagged enumerators over the remainder of the survey.
We were able to benchmark specific groups of enumerators facing similar field conditions, namely location and gender of respondents. This allowed us to compare enumerators to a subset of their peers, rather than the entire set of enumerators.
Our feedback improved enumerator behaviour in the field: flagged enumerators subsequently spent more time on a core module of the questionnaire.
In any survey, two objectives compete: completing a fixed number of interviews per day to reduce costs versus enumerators spending enough time with each respondent to collect meaningful data. To strike a balance between these competing demands, we recommend tracking three paradata indicators: count of completed interviews; average time per completed interview; and ratio of completed to initiated interviews.
We recommend using paradata to improve the quality of data when surveying, thereby reducing standard errors for estimates based on the data and leading to more reliable analysis.
Gender is a central concept and a buzzword in the development aid discourse. Like many buzzwords, its meaning is malleable. If aid efforts really are to “leave no one behind,” as the Sustainable Development Goals proclaim, we must critically interrogate how the discursive articulation of buzzwords such as gender can both make visible and hide from view vulnerabilities that should be salient for aid programming. In this article, we focus on the extent to which the mobilization of “gender” by Norwegian development aid non-governmental organizations' is able to bring vulnerabilities related to sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (SOGIE) to the fore.
The purpose of this study is to examine a corpus of Norwegian NGO development aid policy and planning documents to analyse whether and how gender is articulated differently across different types of documents, and what this means in terms of which gendered vulnerabilities become visible.
We draw on methods from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) to examine a purpose-built corpus of 88 files pulled from framework funding applications submitted by four Norwegian aid NGOs to the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). We analyse the results drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory to examine how conceptual translation between policy and programme-level documents opens up space for the concept to be assigned changing meanings.
While the NGOs at policy level articulate a broad notion of gendered vulnerabilities that include recognition of SOGIE vulnerabilities, this is not translated into practical programme plans. At the programme plan level, gender is articulated as a subject field overwhelmingly concerned with women and firmly attached to a traditional binary sex-gender construct.
Although SOGIE gendered vulnerabilities are increasingly acknowledged in NGO articulations of their priorities and values, this is not reflected in actual programme plans. We argue that this can lead to a misplaced expectation that these concerns are being addressed in the NGOs' activities, obscuring the neglect of SOGIE vulnerabilities in many development aid gender programmes.
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