Education

The sudden rollback of Mexico’s landmark conditional cash transfer programme—Prospera, formerly Progresa—affected boys’ educational outcomes disproportionately, offering lessons for policy retrenchment worldwide.

Why do policymakers choose education reforms that aren’t supported by evidence? And how can researchers work with them to implement interventions with better outcomes? These are thorny questions often faced by education researchers and stakeholders w...

Long-term research on the One Laptop per Child programme reveals that providing laptops to students did not have a positive impact on educational outcomes, likely driven by lack of effects on cognitive skills and limited classroom adoption.

Despite the increased access to primary education in sub-Saharan Africa, secondary school enrolment and completion remains low. Evidence from Uganda reveals that universal secondary school policies can play a transformative role in women’s empowermen...

Can taking textbooks home improve student learning when resources are highly constrained? New research from fragile areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo suggests it can.

In Bihar, India and in rural Zambia, the government introduced programmes to address gender gaps in education by providing adolescent girls with bicycles for their commute to school. Discussing the immediate and long-term impacts of these initiatives...

Indigenous students worldwide face significant educational barriers. In Panama, the Ngäbe-Buglé students score among the lowest on national assessments. The JADENKÄ programme, an innovative intercultural bilingual initiative, was launched to address ...

Home visitation and group meeting parenting programmes have improved child development in low- and middle-income countries, but are too expensive to be delivered at large scale. Evidence from India shows that a programme using automated phone calls w...

As countries in Sub-Saharan Africa debate the costs and benefits of subsidising secondary education, a 15-year RCT in Ghana finds large multi-generation impacts.