Education

Around the world, governments are under pressure to improve learning outcomes. There is now an unprecedented wealth of research, yet this rarely reaches the people making decisions. The sector needs to shift from producing evidence for governments to generating it with them. True progress lies not only in discovering what works, but in building systems that learn, adapt, and implement at scale.

In Andhra Pradesh, credit contraction in the rural economy, triggered by microfinance regulation, lowered educational investments and caused lasting learning losses, with larger effects for girls and younger children.

In Mexico, children in safe areas suffer lasting academic harm when peers who fled local violence transfer to their schools – even though they were never directly exposed to that violence themselves. This hidden cost of violence is especially pronoun...

A large field experiment in Brazil finds that simply reminding parents to pay attention to school improves student outcomes about the same as sending them detailed, child-specific information – suggesting that informational interventions work largely...

A zero-cost nudge – simply listing hard-to-staff schools first in an online vacancy platform – significantly increased the share of teachers applying to and being placed in under-resourced schools. The effect appears to be driven by choice overload r...

In Lesotho, children who start school at older ages attain higher levels of education. In adulthood, they are more likely to have professional occupations and less likely to start families early, contract HIV, or experience child mortality.

A large-scale conditional cash transfer programme in Chile increased earnings, reduced ethnic inequality, and improved children’s learning outcomes across two generations.

Generative AI is reshaping education, but whether it strengthens learning or undermines it may depend on how it is used. In a randomised controlled trial in nine public secondary schools in Edo State, Nigeria, we tested a six-week after-school progra...