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 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
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
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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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 development objective of the Third Elementary Education Project for India is to improve school outcomes of elementary school children through quality-oriented interventions.
... Vea más + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: (a) location (environmental and social features of the site and surrounding land-uses); (b) design (lay-out within the campus, sanitation, water supply, drainage, solid waste arrangements, waste water management, ventilation, access, energy efficiency, material usage, fire safety, storage facility, and natural disaster dimension); and (c) construction management, including occupational health and safety issues will have to be dealt with in cases where new school construction and or additional civil works to meet the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) requirements, including toilets and water facilities are envisaged. This will also include the situations where need based infrastructure is introduced for children with special needs. In a vast majority of the cases where the school infrastructure has already been created, the most pertinent environment, health, and safety issues revolve around the need for maintaining a clean, hygienic and safe learning, and teaching environment. Issues such as regular cleaning and proper maintenance of toilets, kitchen, water supply facilities, regular quality checks for the potable water supply, and waste management will require attention.
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Pay schemes in the public sector aim to attract motivated, high-ability applicants. A nascent literature has found positive effects of higher pay on ability and no or slightly positive effects on motivation.
... Vea más + This paper revisits this issue with a novel subject pool, students destined for the private and public sectors in Indonesia. The analysis uses dictator games and real effort tasks to examine wage effects on a measure of motivation that exactly matches the mission of the public sector task. The model and experimental design allow for precisely measuring (1) the distribution of ability over the effort task; (2) the distribution of motivational preferences for public sector missions; and (3) outside options when choosing to work for public sector missions. Three novel conclusions emerge. First, more pro-social workers do, in fact, exert higher effort in a pro-social task. Second, in contrast to previous research, motivated individuals are more likely to join the public sector when public sector pay is low than when it is high. Third, real public sector workers exhibit greater pro-sociality than private sector workers, even for entrants into the Indonesian Ministry of Finance.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6729 DEC 01, 2013
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
The objective of the Early Childhood Education Project (ECE) for Lao PDR is to increase coverage and improve the quality of pre-primary education and early childhood care services for three to five year old children in disadvantaged districts.
... Vea más + This Ethnic Group Development Plan (EGDP) is formulated to ensure that ethnic groups receive project benefits in culturally appropriate manner and that any negative impacts that may occur from the project, if any, will be fully mitigated. The issues faced by ethnic groups are: 1) lack of early childhood education; 2) inadequate education facilities; 3) inadequate sanitation; 4) water supply issues; 5) poverty; 6) hunger and food security issues; 7) lack of motivation to attend school; 8) shortage of teachers; 9) high dropout rates; and 10) young children having to travel a great distance to attend school. The action plan suggests mitigation measures such as improving educational facilities, improving sanitation and water supply, promoting community awareness on the importance of education, providing ethnic group teachers' training programs, promoting and implementing the National School Meals Program (NSMP), and training and providing community-based caregivers to encourage parents to leave children at school, to minimize the effects of these adversities.
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Plan para los pueblos indígenas IPP687 DEC 01, 2013
This memorandum summarizes the outputs under the European Union (EU) equity and gender technical assistance (TA) task. The development objectives of the task are: (a) to support the Bank's clients in the Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltics (ECCU5) country grouping in managing the effects of the growth slowdown and fiscal consolidation, and (b) deepen the Bank's own understanding of the equity and gender implications of slower growth and budget tightening.
... Vea más + Although primarily a TA task, some of the activities also generate knowledge products (KP). As this was the first time in years for the Bank to have a poverty-focused task in the ECCU5 countries, activities were selected on the basis of three criteria: (i) support to country programs, (ii) diagnostics and analytical due diligence (shared prosperity note), or (iii) opportunistic engagement with clients (gender diagnostics and analysis). Based on the criteria identified, the team delivered a set of TA and KP analytical products based on demand from clients and country management units. The activities consisted of: (i) poverty and gender diagnostics for Croatia and Poland fed directly into the country partnership strategy (CPS) and development policy loans (DPL) documents, (ii) technical inputs to the government of Poland, including a study on the gender pay gap and contributions to a workshop on poverty measurement and distributional analysis, and (iii) a note analyzing well-being in the Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia (EU11) countries, focusing on the Bank's new shared prosperity goal.
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It has been shown that pre-schools are beneficial in helping children develop the skills that are necessary for them in primary school. However, the implementation of pre-school in countries such as Cambodia is challenging due to social and economic constraints.
... Vea más + Research in co-ordination with the government of Cambodia, to evaluate the impact of pilot early childhood development programs being scaled up with assistance from the World Bank, has revealed new challenges that might not be apparent when working on smaller pilots. Issues such as parents who work all day or who work far from the village center have resulted in low use of the preschool services. The results of the evaluation highlight challenges governments face as they move from pilot to scale up. Building on the lessons learned from this evaluation, the government of Cambodia is planning a revised approach in its 2014-2018 strategic education plan to strengthen the quality of preschools and ensure demand for these services.
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Governmental learning has a multidisciplinary research tradition and a plethora of literature exists on organizational as well as policy learning.
... Vea más + Different concepts for structured learning from evaluation results on the governmental level exist. It is common to all that they depend on a careful selection of participants and that the political, cultural, and institutional environment is key to the ultimate success of many governmental learning activities. Policy learning can be fostered by various types of organized activities, which range from peer review frameworks often focused on accountability to international learning processes based on concepts like the governmental learning spiral. This paper discusses and analyzes four examples of evaluation-based governmental learning organized in the framework of the World Bank. This contribution will reflect on different streams of learning theories for the governmental level, as they represent assumptions and motivations for organized learning in governments. The governmental learning spiral, an eight-stage approach to learning from evaluation, is presented, including in the case studies. This article will conclude by reflecting on the concept of the governmental learning spiral and its relation to different levels of learning. This paper is organized as follows: chapter one is introduction; chapter two gives learning theories for the governmental level; chapter three presents concept of the governmental learning spiral; chapter four gives four case studies; chapter five presents lessons; and chapter six presents outlook.
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Documento de trabajo (Serie Numerada) 81259 OCT 09, 2013
Early life health and net nutrition shape childhood and adult cognitive skills and human capital. In poor countries -- and especially in South Asia -- widespread open defecation without making use of a toilet or latrine is an important source of childhood disease.
... Vea más + This paper studies the effects on childhood cognitive achievement of early life exposure to India's Total Sanitation Campaign, a large government program that encouraged local governments to build and promote use of inexpensive pit latrines. In the early years of the program studied here, the TSC caused six-year-olds exposed to it in their first year of life to be more likely to recognize letters and simple numbers. The results suggest both that open defecation is an important threat to the human capital of the Indian labor force, and that a program feasible to low capacity governments in developing countries could improve average cognitive skills.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6659 OCT 01, 2013