This study uses a case study approach to examine the World Bank's policy prescriptions and funding of ICT in education from 2011 to 2022. Through document analysis of the Bank's research, formal policy documents, and its portfolio of projects in K-12 education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the findings reveal a shift in the Bank's educational…

Education spending mandates are popular around the world, especially among central governments in large, decentralized nations, who find that they may be useful in influencing varied local fiscal behavior. I evaluate Indonesia's education spending mandate policy, which insists that district governments allocate at least 20 percent of their budgets…

Purpose: Using longitudinal data of children in Nepal, this study examines the relationships between dropouts, grade repetition and the causes of dropout, such as entrance age, to derive concrete recommendations to improve the basic education completion rates in Nepal, one of the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4).…

LCT has been a recurrent theme in many national educational policies in the global South and has had wide donor support through aid programs and smaller projects and localized innovations. However, the history of the implementation of LCT in different contexts is riddled with stories of failures, grand and small. This article provides an overview…

The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called "domains," and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this…

Germany, which reorganized its industry after the second world war, met a serious workforce insufficiency in the 1960s and tried to compensate this workforce deficit from developing countries. During these years there occurred big worker immigration to Germany from Turkey, which had a serious unemployment problem and an active population. The…

Investments in girls' education in developing countries support U.S. foreign policy, demonstrate U.S. compassion and generosity, drive development efforts, and help reduce extreme poverty. The US Agency for International Development's (USAID's) programming takes into account the gender-related constraints that prevent access of both boys and girls…

The World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand, in March 1990 was influential in the spread of student-centered pedagogies in low-income countries (Ginsburg, 2010). A document prepared in this conference considered the active and participatory teaching approaches as "particularly valuable in assuring learning acquisition…

The devolution of decision-making authority to schools has been widely adopted as the preferred model by many international agencies, including the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), as it is assumed that locating decision-making authority within schools…

This paper examines annual changes in the participation of developing countries in three kinds of learning assessment activity over the past three decades. It specifically highlights, and provides initial explanations for, the worldwide spread of national and regional assessments since the mid-1990s. The paper argues that national learning…

In the present work, we fill a gap in the writing on the decentralization of educational governance by periodizing and comparing trends that have fallen under this label in both the United States and developing countries in the post-WWII period (1945-present). The findings are informed by a review of 127 decentralization-related studies from seven…

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed systems but detrimental in low-performing systems. We…

While school decentralisation policy in Nepal has been taking effect for more than 8 years with the financial and technical assistance of the World Bank, confusion and controversy have been prevalent in relation to its goals, outcomes and sustainability. This article explores the issues of school decentralisation in Nepal by relating the Bank's…

This article analyses the institutional power of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the process of education policy formation in El Salvador during 2003-2005. The results show how bi- and multi-lateral institutions are able to leverage financial and intellectual capital to guide the policymaking process and sway…

Using the experience of the Educational Quality Inputs (EQI) Scheme in Sri Lanka the paper examines the distributional aspects of formula-based funding and efficiency of decentralized management of education funds in a developing country setting. The study finds that the EQI fund distribution is largely pro-poor. However, results show that to…