In this paper we provide a rigorous review of evaluations of education programmes in developing countries. This review is organised to provide guidance to policy-makers by identifying education interventions that are effective, sometimes effective, and not effective and by presenting some information on the cost effectiveness of different types of…

The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO's "Education for All" agenda was replaced by "Education 2030", which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low- and middle-income countries through PISA…

The curriculum for undergraduate engineering courses in Malaysia is becoming increasingly structured, following the global trend for quality assurance in engineering education, through accreditation schemes. Generally, the accreditation criteria call for the graduates from engineering programs to demonstrate a range of skills, from technical…

Background: The dominant theoretical basis of our public health practice originates from a positivist or reductionist paradigm. It fails to take into account the complexity emerging out of public health's multiple influences originating from biological and social worlds. A deeper understanding of the interaction of elements that characterize the…

Most Tanzanian Higher Education Institutes do not have the materials and technology to give students a significant practical experience in the sciences. In 2013 Tanzania was rated 159th out of 187 countries for "human development" (United Nations Development Program 2014 Report). In order to supplement their current, limited practical…

Vocational education emphasises skill acquisition. Quality assurance in vocational education is a concept that is concerned with high performance involving activities with vocational education such as teaching, learning, infrastructures, students' behaviour and the entire academic process. Quality vocational education refers to input and output of…

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality "girl-friendly" primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20 percentage points and increased their test…

After some 65 years of international development assistance, it is still difficult to show the effectiveness of aid in ways that are fully convincing. In part, this reflects inadequacies in the evaluation systems of the bilateral, multilateral, and global organizations that provide official development aid. Underlying these weaknesses often are a…

This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts--in schools and…

What was accomplished and what was learned from United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) investment of over $733 million aimed at strengthening basic education systems in the developing world? These questions were addressed through an analysis of 286 documents drawn from 33 projects sponsored by the USAID between 1990 and 2005.…

In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in financial incentives to encourage students to attend school and to improve their academic achievement, graduation rates, and other outcomes. Conditional cash transfer programs in developing countries, especially PROGRESA in Mexico, have found positive effects on attendance in large-scale…

Since 2001 the government of Cambodia has striven to advance policy-led education reform based on a sector-wide approach. This paper critically reviews the status and progress of Cambodia's education reform from the perspective of the aid's effectiveness. The paper looks at the performance of the sector reform in the three priority areas…

The purpose of this article is to extend the discussion of issues currently being debated on the need for more rigorous program evaluation in educational and other sectors of research, to the field of international development evaluation, reviewing the different approaches which can be adopted to rigorous evaluation methodology and their…

This document was created to serve as a major networking tool of the National Clearinghouse on Development Education (NCoDE). The purpose of the document is to share state of the art practices and common concerns among the expanding development education community. Among the items in the publication is an interview with Elizabeth Hogan,…

"Consciousness-raising" education employs group dialogue to make the poorest individuals in a society aware of their reality and their ability to change it. The author examines two contrasting sets of developmental assumptions in this form of education, the equilibrium and conflict concept of change, and related evaluation issues.…