The Impact of Outsourcing School Management in Liberia

Public-private partnerships to provide education in low-income countries are common, yet controversial. In Liberia, researchers worked with IPA, the Ministry of Education, and a set of eight private operators to conduct a randomized evaluation that measured the impact of 93 partnership schools—free public schools with management outsourced to private operators. After three years, partnership schools raised test scores by 0.21 standard deviations in math and 0.16 standard deviations in English (equivalent to 4 words per minute additional reading fluency for the cohort that started in first grade). Looking beyond learning gains, the program reduced corporal punishment (by 4.6 percentage points from a base of 51%), but increased dropout (by 3.3 percentage points from a base of 15%) and failed to reduce sexual abuse. Results vary by provider: some produced uniformly positive results, while others present stark trade-offs between learning gains and other outcomes.

Read the three-year preliminary results brief here and the working paper here.

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NEW VIDEO

Behind the Data

In this film, a data collection team with Innovations for Poverty Action travels to Pujehun district in Sierra Leone to conduct surveys for a randomized evaluation. While there, the team meets with elders, navigates barely passable roads, and travels by canoe to track survey respondents, all part of their mission to collect high-quality data—data that is fed into the research and evidence decision-makers need in order to know what works, what doesn't, and why.

Watch the full video here.

NEW RESULTS

Does Disseminating Information through Peer Networks Reinforce Gender Inequalities?

Researchers: Lori Beaman, Andrew Dillon

Social networks are often seen as a cost-effective way to disseminate information, but there is a lack of evidence to inform who to give information to within a network to best reach others within the community. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in Mali to study the role of giving information to different people within a network in the spread of that information. Farmers more closely connected to those who were trained had more information. Female farmers were less likely to receive information, indicating that disseminating information through social networks may reinforce existing gender inequalities.

Read the full summary here and link to the published paper here ( ungated).

BLOG

Five Lessons From a Year of Sharing Evidence Strategically
By Heidi McAnnally-Linz

Why We Are Building A Humanitarian and Forced Displacement Initiative
By Sebastian Chaskel and Radha Rajkotia

Embedded Evidence Labs: From Peru to Ghana to Zambia
By Annie Chumpitaz Torres and Besnart Simunchembu Kangalu