Ila Fazzio, Alex Eble, Robin Lumsdaine, Peter Boone, Baboucarr Bouy, Pei-tseng Jenny Hsieh, Chitra Jayanty, Simon Johnson, Filipa Silva 16 December 2020
Achieving universal basic literacy and numeracy has long been a policy goal for development agencies working in areas of extreme poverty. This column presents evidence from a bundled intervention in rural Guinea Bissau which suggests that targeted education policies can have substantial positive effects on children’s schooling outcomes. Such policies could play a key role in helping people ‘escape’ the poverty trap, as the education gains from such interventions elevate local children’s attainment levels far beyond those found in neighboring areas.
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Achieving child literacy and numeracy in the world’s poorest areas: Evidence from rural Guinea Bissau
Children in many extremely poor, remote regions are growing up illiterate and innumerate despite high reported school enrolment ratios (Pritchett 2013, Glewwe and Muralidharan 2016)…