Knowledge, learning, and innovation are one of eight objectives that will be monitored in the Bank's new strategy. The independent evaluation group (IEG) is conducting a program of learning and results evaluations to promote a better understanding of how the World Bank acquires, captures, and transfers knowledge and learning in its lending operations, and what scope there is for improving.
... Vea más + The objective of the program is to delineate attributes of effective learning in World Bank lending. These attributes refer to learning into lending (inputs into project design); learning while lending (feedback and modifications of design and implementation while the project is underway); and learning from lending (lessons from the project that were transmitted to other projects). The evaluation program will assess how the Bank can become better at generating, accessing, and using learning and knowledge in its lending operations. It acknowledges the importance of the feedback from knowledge to learning and from learning back to enhanced knowledge. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives approach and context. Chapter two explores two essential aspects of learning - knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration and the factors influencing them. Chapter three examines the contribution of mentoring. Chapter four addresses the extent to which incentives, leadership, and culture are aligned to promote learning in lending. Chapter five considers the implications of the report's findings, for the Bank's change process, for IEG, and for the design of the second evaluation in IEG's learning and results series.
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This document presents the work program and budget proposal for FY15 for the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) and indicative plans for FY16-17.
... Vea más + It outlines the results and impact that IEG expects to achieve; strategic priorities and alignment with the new World Bank Group (WBG) strategy; changes to business lines, including what IEG will be doing more and less of; and details on work program deliverables and resource management. IEG faces a unique opportunity to deepen its impact, and make a significant contribution to the successful implementation of the new WBG strategy. To achieve the twin goals, the WBG and its clients and partners need to better understand what works and the reasons why, and draw lessons and good practices from experience to inform decision making and future action. Independent evaluation is essential to help the WBG address these challenges and build a stronger internal culture for results, accountability, and learning.
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This study examines whether financial incentives through pay flexibility can improve the performance of staff in government bureaucracies. Its main messages for pay policy are pay flexibility can improve performance, pay flexibility works most strikingly in changing managerial behavior.
... Vea más + Improving public sector performance does not need to wait for systematic pay rationalization or pay simplification throughout government. Pay flexibility can work with rather than instead of long-term career incentives. The strategy and implementation of pay flexibility reforms must take into account the extent of fragmentation and complexity of the existing public sector pay structure in the country.
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This working paper presents a benchmarking analysis of School Based Management (SBM) using empirical data from the Philippines. School based management is widely used as a policy tool in many countries that seek to improve the quality of service delivery through decentralization.
... Vea más + School based management typically takes many years to have an impact on educational outcomes, but policy makers need to know sooner how well the policy is being implemented. The paper extends the well-known Rasch methodology from the literature on student achievement, including the Programme for International Student Assessment, to the measurement of the implementation of school based management by computing a Rasch measure of the implementation of school based management. To test whether the resulting benchmarked measure is plausible and has practical policy value, the measure is tested for correlations with standardized measures of personality and political skills of school principals, developed in the psychology and political science literatures. The paper will be useful for readers interested in studying school based management as well as those interested more generally in the methodology of benchmarking implementation of public policy where the ultimate results are subject to long implementation periods. The methodology presented in this paper can be applied to enhance the rigor of the ongoing Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) exercise to benchmark educational policies in various domains. That exercise is set to become one of the flagship policy analytical tools being developed by the World Bank and partner agencies.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6938 JUN 01, 2014
Educators believe that they are adequately preparing youth for the labor market while employers lament the lack of skills. A possible source of the mismatch in perceptions is that employers and educators have different understandings of the types of skills valued in the labor market.
... Vea más + This paper uses economics and psychology literature to define four skills sets: socio-emotional, higher-order cognitive, basic cognitive, and technical skills. The paper reviews the literature that quantitatively measures employer skill demand, as reported in preference surveys. A sample of 28 studies reveals remarkable consistency across the world in the skills demanded by employers. Although employers value all skill sets, there is a greater demand for socio-emotional and higher-order cognitive skills than for basic cognitive or technical skills. These results are robust across economy size and level of development, sector, export-orientation, and occupations. Employers perceive that the greatest skills gaps are in socio-emotional and technical skills. These findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize education and training systems. Taking into consideration the developmental process to acquire the skills identified by employers, this implies the need to recognize that (a) the job-skills development process necessarily begins at birth and continues throughout the life cycle so skills policy should, as well; (b) schools play a relevant, but limited, role in skills development and the role of parents, mentors, and the work place must be defined and enhanced; and (c) the skills most demanded by employers -- higher-order cognitive and socio-emotional skills -- are largely taught (the former) or refined in secondary school, which argues for a general education until these skills are formed.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6853 MAY 01, 2014
In Liberia, where civil wars were fought on and off between 1989 and 2003, the non-profit organization, action on armed violence, the Government of Liberia, and the United Nations developed an innovative program to help ex-combatants move into full-time farm work by giving them training, counseling, and start-up capital.
... Vea más + The evaluation found that the program successfully shifted high-risk men from criminal activities into farming. The evaluation also showed that skills training aren't always enough. As policy makers in the region look to strengthen their economies and boost stability, the results of this evaluation offer guidelines for crafting successful programs. These findings will likely help development experts to create programs that help the millions of young people entering the labor force find meaningful and productive work.
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There is a growing interest in the role that entrepreneurship can play as a catalyst to achieve economic and social development objectives, including growth, innovation, employment, and equity.
... Vea más + Entrepreneurship can manifest within an economy in a number of ways, and it includes both formal and informal economic activities for the purposes of creating wealth. In turn, entrepreneurship can contribute to economic development through high-growth enterprises or, as in the case of necessity-driven entrepreneurship, through enterprises that can serve as an important source of income and employment for vulnerable populations. The variety of potential beneficial spillovers of entrepreneurship in turn focuses attention on interventions that stimulate individuals' decisions to become and succeed as entrepreneurs. A current focus of entrepreneurship promotion is the role of mindsets and skills in enabling individuals to both recognize and capitalize on entrepreneurial opportunities. Research suggesting that several of these mindsets, types of knowledge, and skills can be learned situates educational institutions and training programs firmly within the broader discussions around entrepreneurship promotion. The remainder of this study is organized into four chapters: chapter two summarizes major findings and trends in entrepreneurship education and training, or EET research, particularly around the rationale for investing in EET and the potential role of government in EET programs. Chapter three sheds light on the difference between EE and ET and proposes a conceptual framework for analysis. Chapter four analyzes the global landscape of EET programs, using the conceptual framework and looking specifically at the achievement of outcomes, specific program characteristics, and the role of contextual factors. Chapter five summarizes the study's findings and lays out potential implications for policymakers. The chapter also presents a roadmap for informing EET program design and implementation and proposes areas for further research.
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This report summarizes the experience from a series of pilot trainings in the Solomon Islands, organized by the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) and four provinces with support from the World Bank in an effort to provide practical information for operational teams seeking to integrate gender issues into disaster risk management program.
... Vea más + While the training has been specifically developed for four provinces in the Solomon Islands, the sample training program, documented in this report can inform teams in the region and beyond that are preparing similar trainings in terms of the design, implementation, content and sequencing of presentations, activities and discussions, and other practical considerations. This report is a product of the staff of the World Bank with external contributions by Australian Aid.
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Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries.
... Vea más + This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, the paper uses the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. It finds important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where panel data to follow children over time exists, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. These results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6779 FEB 01, 2014
This paper investigates the effects of intermittent screening and treatment of malaria on the health and education of school children in an area of low-to-moderate malaria transmission.
... Vea más + A cluster randomized trial was implemented with 5,233 children in 101 government primary schools on the south coast of Kenya in 2010-12. The intervention was delivered to children randomly selected from classes 1 and 5 who were followed up twice across 24 months. Once during each school term, public health workers used malaria rapid diagnostic tests to screen the children. Children who tested positive were treated with a six-dose regimen of artemether-lumefantrine. Given the nature of the intervention, the trial was not blinded. The primary outcomes were anemia and sustained attention and the secondary outcomes were malaria parasitaemia and educational achievement. The data were analyzed on an intention-to-treat basis. Anemia in this setting in Kenya, intermittent screening and treatment, as implemented in this study, is not effective in improving the health or education of school children. Possible reasons for the absence of an impact are the marked geographical heterogeneity in transmission, the rapid rate of reinfection following artemether-lumefantrine treatment, the variable reliability of malaria rapid diagnostic tests, and the relative contribution of malaria to the etiology of anemia in this setting.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6791 FEB 01, 2014
Halliday, Katherine E.; Okello, George; Turner, Elizabeth L.; Njagi, Kiambo; Mcharo, Carlos; Kengo, Juddy; Allen, Elizabeth; Dubeck, Margaret M.; Jukes, Matthew C.H.; Brooker, Simon J.
This paper studies the relative academic performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to South African university dormitories. Tracked or streamed assignment creates dormitories where all students obtained similar scores on high school graduation examinations.
... Vea más + Random assignment creates dormitories that are approximately representative of the population of students. Tracking lowers students' mean grades in their first year of university and increases the variance or inequality of grades. This result is driven by a large negative effect of tracking on low-scoring students' grades and a near-zero effect on high-scoring students' grades. Low-scoring students are more sensitive to changes in their peer group composition and their grades suffer if they live only with low-scoring peers. In this setting, residential tracking has undesirable efficiency (lower mean) and equity (higher variance) effects. The result isolates a pure peer effect of tracking, whereas classroom tracking studies identify a combination of peer effects and differences in teacher behavior across tracked and untracked classrooms. The negative pure peer effect of residential tracking suggests that classroom tracking may also have negative effects unless teachers are more effective in homogeneous classrooms. Random variation in peer group composition under random dormitory assignment also generates peer effects. Living with higher-scoring peers increases students' grades and the effect is larger for low-scoring students. This is consistent with the aggregate effects of tracking relative to random assignment. However, using peer effects estimated in randomly assigned groups to predict outcomes in tracked groups yields unreliable predictions. This illustrates a more general risk that peer effects estimated under one peer group assignment policy provide limited information about how peer effects might work with a different peer group assignment policy.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6787 FEB 01, 2014
This paper assesses whether the Indonesia Early Childhood Education and Development project had an impact on early achievement gaps as measured by an array of child development outcomes and enrollment.
... Vea más + The analysis is based on longitudinal data collected in 2009 and 2010 on approximately 3,000 four-year-old children residing in 310 villages located in nine districts across Indonesia. The study begins by documenting the intent-to-treat impact of the project. It then compares the achievement gaps between richer and poorer children living in project villages with those of richer and poorer children living in non-project villages. There is clear evidence that in project villages, the achievement gap between richer and poorer children decreased on many dimensions. By contrast, in non-project villages, this gap either increased or stayed constant. Given Indonesia's interest in increasing access to early childhood services for all children, and the need to ensure more efficient spending on education, the paper discusses how three existing policies and programs could be leveraged to ensure that Indonesia's vision for holistic, integrated early childhood services becomes a reality. The lessons from Indonesia's experience apply more broadly to countries seeking to reduce early achievement gaps and expand access to pre-primary education.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6794 FEB 01, 2014
Ombuds Services (OMB) and the Respectful Workplace Advisors (RWA) Program aim to help any Bank Group employee address any kind of workplace issue, in a confidential and informal way.
... Vea más + The Ombuds office provides training, support, and back-up to the RWAs, who are volunteer staff chosen by peers and located primarily in the country offices (COs). This annual report summarizes usage patterns, issues raised and observed for both programs, and OMB exit survey data. This year, the RWA Program achieved many objectives. RWAs made 540 referrals to the Internal Justice System (IJS) and other services, strengthening their status as critical local resources. The number of presentations that involve RWAs as one of the partners of the IJS continues to increase. RWAs are also increasingly included in new staff orientation in their locations. In an effort to partner better with our stakeholders, the RWA team intentionally increased opportunities to meet with HR teams, Learning Coordinators, the VP HR, and the change reform groups. The RWA Program has now become an integral part of the Conflict Resolution System (CRS), and RWAs are increasingly involved in CRS activities. Some of the program's challenges continue to be the heavy administrative demands of the nomination process and the inability to take full advantage of the rich data in the RWA activity forms.
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Below the glass floor is a report that explores the impact of recent increases in operational function grant funding to provinces to support rural health service delivery.
... Vea más + It seeks to identify what expenditure provinces have made to support and enable key front line service delivery activities such as; facility operations, patrols, medical supply distribution, emergency patient transfer, rural water supply and facility supervision. This top down trend analysis seeks to identify whether spending has been made in these areas as a first step in understanding the effectiveness of the governments' financial arrangements. The next step is to triangulate the findings using field-based research that assesses what impact the funding is having at the facility level.
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As part of agribusiness innovation program (AIP), infoDev designed an agribusiness incubation training program. AIP seeks to catalyze inclusive growth by accelerating the growth of pioneering agribusinesses.
... Vea más + The program aims to: (1) develop and test new approaches to connecting innovative, growth-oriented entrepreneurs to the knowledge, markets, networks, and capital needed to advance enterprises; (2) build local capacity and enable public-private partnerships to deliver approaches; and (3) deliver solid methodologies to the development community for planning, supporting, monitoring and evaluating initiatives that advance the growth of innovative agribusiness enterprises through provision of financial and non-financial services. The module also provides insights into agribusiness value chains, which are critical for understanding how the shift from supply chains to value chains and from commodities to differentiated products, opens up new opportunities for processors and other innovative enterprises to compete on value rather than price and in new markets. It has proven successful in conveying the fundamentals of agribusiness innovation as well as exposing trainees to the variety of business models that exist and can be explored.
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The objective of the Capacity Building for Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response Project is to enhance the national capacity in preparedness for and response to five priority zoonotic diseases, namely Avian Influenza (H5N1), brucellosis, hydatid disease (echinococcosis), anthrax and CCHF in Mongolia.
... Vea más + The changes include: extending the project closing date by two months, from December 31, 2013 to February 28, 2014. The reasons for requesting an extension include: (i) delayed project effectiveness reduced the implementation period to 10 months, negatively affecting the ability to complete all activities; (ii) the complexity of the Project, which covered emerging infectious diseases (Anthrax, Brucellosis, Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, Ecchinococcusis, and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza) and involvement of a number of sectors (emergency management, human health, animal health, state professional inspection agency) and 10 aimags (Provinces); (iii) savings realized through efficient procurement, and exchange rate fluctuations between the Mongolian Tugrik and the US dollar which would allow for additional activities to be carried out; and (iv) on the basis of progress to date, it is possible for the project to accomplish all the remaining activities within the extension period requested. Reallocation of project proceeds to meet the current needs of the project to allow for: (a) purchasing some essential equipment for laboratory strengthening in Umnogovi aimag; (b) enhancements to the incident response information system; and (c) supporting intensive and frequent supervision by the implementing agencies during the extension. This will result in increases to the goods, consultants' services, and incremental operating costs, and a reduction in the allocation to training, workshops and study tours due to savings in that category.
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The method of randomization has been a major driver in the recent rise to prominence of empirical development economics. It has helped uncover patterns and facts that had earlier escaped attention.
... Vea más + But it has also given rise to debate and controversy. This paper evaluates the method of randomization and concludes that, while the method of randomization is the gold standard for description, and does uncover what is here called 'circumstantial causality,' it is not able to demonstrate generalized causality. Nor does it, in itself, lead to policy conclusions, as is often claimed by its advocates. To get to policy conclusions requires combining the findings of randomized experiments with human intuition, which, being founded in evolution, has innate strengths. Moreover, even non-randomized empirical methods combined with reasoned intuition can help in crafting development policy.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6722 DEC 01, 2013