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Cities are rapidly changing, and so is the agency of urban infrastructure. It is necessary for policy discussions around urban informality to keep up with this changing pace. This paper begins by exploring how urban infrastructure plays an increasingly structural role in influencing the politics of inclusion & exclusion within a city. It further tries to explore how the definition of informality in an urban setting has moved beyond ‘economic class’ to include broader social paradigms of migration and gender. It has become increasingly important to question the agency of urban infrastructure, especially in the face of a pandemic. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which policy discussions around gender and internal migration (especially in a post-covid world) should take into account changes in order to make urban centres truly inclusive spaces.

This paper presents evidence from the first three years of a randomized controlled trial of a government-administered pilot teacher performance pay program in Punjab, Pakistan. The program offers yearly cash bonuses to teachers in a sample of public primary schools with the lowest mean student exam scores in the province. Bonuses are linked to three school-level indicators: the gain in student exam scores, the gain in school enrollment, and the level of student exam participation. Bonus receipt and size are also randomly assigned across schools according to whether or not the teacher is the school’s head. On average, the program increases school enrollment by 4.1 percent and student exam participation rates by 3.4 percentage points, both in the third year. The analysis does not find that the program increases student exam scores in any year. Mean impacts are similar across program variants. The positive mean impact on school enrollment is mainly seen in urban schools and the positive mean impact on student exam participation rates is only seen in rural schools.

This policy note is aimed at contributing to a broader discussion on how the private sector can be best used to achieve priority educational goals in India. This paper includes the following contents: background and objectives; the grant-in-aid system in India - an historical perspective; size of the private aided sector in India - school education; size of the private aided sector in India - higher education; public expenditures on grants-in-aid; performance and costs of aided institutions; issues for reform in the GIA sector; recent attempts at reform; and recommendations.

Disparities in school outcomes are an important source of income inequality, especially in rapidly developing and developed economies where the returns to schooling have been increasing. It is therefore important to document and understand the sources of schooling inequality. The intergenerational transmission of schooling is an important reason for the persistence of schooling disparities over time. More-educated parents are much more likely than less-educated parents to invest in the schooling of their children owing to different preferences, better financial circumstances, and their own greater human capital. In this paper, authors explore whether the association between parental and child schooling has strengthened or weakened over time. Authors find strong, but declining, effects of parental schooling on (male and female) child schooling over time, even after controlling for other variables. The improved distribution of schooling will have likely played an important role in improving the distribution of income in the country had there not been other compensating changes.

The paper deals with the development and the perspectives of the Sikh studies regarding the Punjab studies.

Providing quality training that leads young people to jobs is critical for the economic and social development of the Province of Sindh, Pakistan. This working paper assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Sindh Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (STEVTA) as a provincial apex body in Technical Education and Vocational Training (TVET). The recent establishment of STEVTA was a major step to reduce fragmentation of training policies and programs. The paper assesses the Authority's legal foundation, governance, management, organization, human resources, financial resources and management, and networking with external organizations. The institutional assessment finds that Government of Sindh and STEVTA need to: (i) strengthen its governance by establishing a clearer reporting structure for the management of the authority's director, and by increasing the involvement of the private sector in the board, (ii) enhance its institutional capacity through hiring of teachers in its institutions based upon increased funding and a sustainable HR rationalization plan for the system that is coordinated with planned physical investments in institutions, and (iii) build strong operational capacity by establishing rules of business and management information systems, and drafting a strategic plan. Lastly, to fully achieve its mandate, continued and consistent governmental support is essential to give STEVTA stability and funding to fulfill its mandate: employment through skills.

Sri Lanka is a lower-middle income country with a per capita income of approximately US$ 2,400, and a population of around 20 million people. Sri Lanka's high rate of literacy is due to its sustained growth through the twentieth century. Primary education spans the first five grades of schooling, grades 1-5. Student's progress automatically to lower secondary education for four years of education in grades 6-9 and then on to upper secondary education in grades 10-11 for a two year course that culminates in the General Certificate of Education Ordinary level examination (GCE O-L). The curriculum for primary education is designed separately from those for subsequent stages of education. The primary education curriculum stage is encapsulated in a primary curriculum framework that derives from extensive debate during the 1990s in connection with the recommendations in 1997 of the national education commission, the work of the technical committee on primary education appointed by the presidential task force and detailed implementation work by the primary education unit of the national institute of education. Since 2003 the National Educational Research Centre (NEREC) based at the University of Colombo has administered tests in first Language, Mathematics and English to grade 4 children in a sample of schools country-wide. In the 2009 assessments a cut-off percentage of 80 percent rather than 50 percent were 48 percent in First Language, 53 percent in Mathematics and just 19 percent in English. The budget of the national Ministry of education includes a separate budget line for primary education but this money is allocated only to the primary sections of national schools. Province, zone, division and school budget do not separate allocations and expenditure for primary and secondary. There is no reason in principle why separate budget lines could not be created for most types of expenditure.

The central and state governments of India have been pursuing several reforms in the higher education sector. In engineering education, the government has already embarked on several reforms within the current legislative framework. Given this dynamic momentum, the engineering education sector in India is expected to receive a significant boost over the next few years. It is therefore timely to take stock and review the position of the sector internationally. This study thus aims to provide the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and relevant stakeholders with key facts, reliable data, and the results of relevant international comparisons to establish a common ground and to help in measuring the performance of the current engineering education system in India. The government also recognizes the importance of lessons that may be learned from the other Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, and China (BRIC) countries, and these countries were therefore selected for the comparison. This report is organized as follows: section one gives introduction; section two briefly discusses the background of both general higher education and engineering education in India. Section three reviews earlier comparative studies on international engineering education. Section four describes the scope of the study. Section five explains the methodology of data collection and identifies the data sources. Section six outlines the analysis of the collected data and the findings. Section seven presents conclusions. The appendixes describe the engineering education systems of the various countries examined in the study, the related challenges and opportunities, and the future policy goals in each country.

Education is one of the most important determinants of economic performance in the modern world. This is true of both countries and individuals. The main characteristic which distinguishes between advanced economies, middle-income economies and low-income countries, is the knowledge content of their production activities and processes. Economic activities and products have become increasingly knowledge and skill-intensive in recent years. In addition, the importance of knowledge and skills is growing at an accelerating pace. Education is at the heart of human capital accumulation and economic growth. Education increases cognitive skills and soft skills of individuals. In addition, education improves the capacity of individuals to be trained for specific occupations and to acquire job-related skills. These effects of education enable individuals to accumulate human capital, improve labor productivity and increase life-cycle earnings. In the aggregate, this process generates economic growth. Investment in education produces a broad range of social benefits. Well-educated individuals, especially women, are better able to control their fertility and family health, resulting in reduced child, infant and maternal mortality, and higher life expectancy. Education also facilitates social mobility by creating opportunities for poor and disadvantaged groups to raise their economic and social status. A broad range of further externality benefits of education have been identified in the economic literature. These cover aspects of social well-being such as better political decision making, reduced incidence of crime, and higher quality public services. Education also produces inter-generational economic and social benefits: increased education in one generation improves schooling, labor productivity and income in the next. The public goods, informational imperfections and distributive justice aspects of education provide the economic justification for state investment in the education sector.

This paper uses survey data from representative samples of government and private schools in two states of India, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, to explore systematic differences between the two school types. The authors find that private school students have higher test scores than government school students. However, in both private and government schools the overall quality is low and learning gains from one grade to the next are small. There is large variation in the quality of both school types; and observed school and teacher characteristics are weakly correlated with learning outcomes. There is considerable sorting among students, and those from higher socio-economic strata select into private schools. Private schools have lower pupil-teacher ratios and seven to eight times' lower teacher salaries but do not differ systematically in infrastructure and teacher effort from government schools. Most of the variation in teacher effort is within schools and is weakly correlated with observed teacher characteristics such as education, training, and experience. After controlling for observed student and school characteristics, the private school advantage over government schools in test scores varies by state, school type and grade. Private unrecognized schools do better than private recognized schools. Given the large salary differential, private schools would clearly be more cost effective even in the case of no absolute difference in test scores.

The quality of education is a major policy challenge facing the Maldives. The country achieved the first generation objective of providing universal access to basic education through rapid expansion of enrollment. As is frequently the case with such countries, the second generation challenge is to provide education of adequate quality. Evidence from a variety of sources shows that education quality in the Maldives is weak, and needs urgent improvement. Learning outcomes in both primary and secondary education are modest. National assessments of learning outcomes at Grade 4 and Grade 7 show that learning levels are unsatisfactory. The low average scores suggest that learning levels in both primary education and lower secondary education are weak. There are several dimensions of education quality which Maldivian policy makers consider to be of vital importance. Among these, the quality of school teachers is central to the improvement of education quality. Hence, the Ministry of Education (MOE) is concerned to develop the skills, motivation and performance of teachers. A second key policy initiative is the establishment of a sound quality assurance framework for the school system. The MOE has developed a quality assurance mechanism, which now needs to be pilot tested, refined and scaled up throughout the country. A third strategic policy initiative is the development of a system of regular national assessments of learning outcomes, which can then feed into policy formulation and program development. These three strategic policy initiatives are discussed in the subsequent sections of this report.

School health and nutrition (SHN) programs are critical for achieving education for all (EFA) as research has shown that improvements in health status contribute to improvements in learning and academic outcomes. Through programs targeted to address major health conditions that are highly prevalent among poor schoolchildren, (for example, iron deficiency anemia, hunger, worm infections, diarrheal disease, and malaria) SHN programs can have a large impact on children’s education, increasing the time that they spend at school and their ability to learn while at school. SHN programs are recognized as important educational policy initiatives to improve education outcomes. Furthermore, schools provide an excellent platform for the delivery of child health and nutrition services, where they can strengthen the cost-effectiveness of health interventions and deliver gains in participation and learning. In this paper, the policy platform is documented as well as the type, coverage, and the effect of the SHN interventions, followed by the key areas identified for development and learning of the school health promotion program (SHPP).

Accessibility and quality of education is a much-debated issue today. In Bhutan this is especially a concern for the population scattered across the extreme mountainous terrain of the country. Difficult access and spatial isolation leads to an unequal distribution of the quality services in Bhutan. It is also an issue for children in urban communities despite the easy access to schools. Poverty and disability hold children back from enrolling in and completing school. Hence, the education resilience in these vulnerable communities can differ accordingly even despite the fact that the government provides free basic education in Bhutan. We define resilience as the ability of students, education institutions, and communities to achieve positive education outcomes in spite of adversities, such as the marginalization, isolation and poverty that exist in pockets in Bhutan. This report presents the results of our pilot study. We consulted with education policy makers and implementers at the national level, and communities, parents and children themselves at the local level, to conduct an in-depth analysis of the risks and the assets (strengths, opportunities and resources), that exist in schools, homes and in communities. Accordingly, recommendations are also made in this report with a view towards filling the gaps and enhancing the relevance of education policies and programs based on the evidence collected from the field during the study.

Private schooling is an important feature of the educational landscape in Pakistan and is increasingly a topic of public and government discourse. This study uses multiple rounds of national household sample surveys to examine the extent and nature of private school participation at the primary and secondary levels in Pakistan. Today, one-fifth of children -- or one-third of all students -- go to private school in Pakistan. Private school students tend to come from urban, wealthier, and more educated households than do government school students and especially out-of-school children. Important differences exist across Pakistan s four provinces with respect to the characteristics of private school students relative to government school students, as well as in the composition of private school students. Private schooling is highly concentrated, with a few districts (situated mainly in northern Punjab province) accounting for most of the private school students. Private school participation among children varies largely from one household to another, rather than within households, and to a greater extent than does government school participation. The spatial patterns of private school supply are often strongly correlated with the spatial patterns of private school participation. In the 2000s, private school participation rates grew in Punjab, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces and across socioeconomic subgroups, contributing in particular to the growth in overall school participation rates for boys, children from urban households, and children from households in the highest wealth quintile. Nevertheless, the composition of private school students has become less unequal over time. This trend has been driven mainly by Punjab province, which has seen declines in the shares of private school students from urban households and households in the highest wealth quintile.

A nation's utilization and creation of knowledge endeavors are globally acknowledged as the driving forces for economic development and competitiveness. Public and private investments in institutions of higher education and research require strengthening in tandem with the development of a regulatory environment that supports national and institutional growth. In recognition of these issues, the Government of Bangladesh's first Higher Education Strategic Plan (2006-2026) proposed a long-term development plan for the higher education sector, recommending that the plan will need to be cognizant of both universities and the Bangladesh National University-affiliated colleges where the majority of post-secondary graduates are enrolled. This study addresses challenges faced by a major part of the higher education sector in Bangladesh - the colleges. The objectives of the study are to: a) review and analyze the college education system of Bangladesh and b) identify policy options which will guide the government as it prepares a long-term strategy to improve the quality and relevance of higher education. This report is divided into the four key areas ripe for reform: a) access and equity, b) quality and relevance, c) financing, and d) governance.

This study finds that college-going Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual (LGBTQIA) persons on Delhi campuses face a highly discriminatory context of adversity, which makes their desired outcome for acceptance virtually impossible to achieve. Using the mixed-methods resilience research approach, this project examines how they negotiate through these challenges to reach some approximation of acceptance in their lives. The study aims to gain a better understanding of the issues that persons who identify as LGBTQIA face, the resilience strategies that enable respondents, and how the costs of these resilience strategies are negotiated. It covers the following five thematic areas: (1) understanding what acceptance means for respondents, and how they try to navigate towards it; (2) charting the types of discrimination and stigma that respondents face in their educational environment; (3) identifying the resources and support networks respondents use to cope with discrimination and what, if any, consequences accompany their use; (4) determining the impact of protective and promotive resilience strategies on the context of adversity and the gaining of acceptance; and (5) exploring how respondentss fears and hopes for their futures evolve during higher education. The study finds that while respondents use multiple resilience strategies to carve out a space where they belong and find acceptance, these strategies are costly. The costs are born out of and reinforce the stigma and discrimination against LGBTQIA prevalent in Indian society. Individuals and the LGBTQIA community on Delhi campuses have thus had to strategically navigate their environment to modulate these costs. Our research indicates that these strategies can in turn be used to alter the context of adversity for LGBTQIA students on Delhi campuses.

Nepal is a partner to the international commitment to achieve the goals of Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Efforts have been made through the EFA National Plan of Action 2003-2015 and School Sector Reform Program (SSRP) to achieve the EFA goals and the MDGs. Over the last few years, Nepal has demonstrated progress in some of the indicators related to children s participation in school. The Department of Education (2012) has reported that the primary education Net Enrolment Rate (NER), Grade 1 Net Intake Rate (NIR), Grade 5 Survival Rate (SR), and Dropout Rate (DR), are 95.3, 91.2, 84.1, and 5.2 percent respectively. However, it will be difficult to close the bigger gaps of 4.7, 8.8, 15.9, and 5.2 percent of the NER, NIR, SR, and DR respectively by 2015. The challenge lies in the large number of school-aged children who do not attend formal primary schooling. Likewise, a significant number of students repeat grades and those promoted may have low achievement. Realizing this bleak educational scenario, Nepal has been focusing more on access to quality education for the children of economically marginalized people through equity measures (scholarships and incentives). These children belong to the poorest groups (Wagley, September 2013, The Himalayan Times), such as the disadvantaged and the deprived communities of urban squatter settlements. Many reasons have been identified for the phenomenon of out-of-school children, including poor family economic conditions, an unfavorable school environment, socio-cultural beliefs and traditions, parents not recognizing the importance of education, inaccessible schools for children with disabilities, parents unwillingness, corporal punishment and children s domestic responsibilities (Scheuermann 2013). Other factors listed as contributing to primary level dropout are violence in school such as corporal punishment by teachers (Nepal, DoE 2010), children s domestic responsibilities, and an unfavorable school environment (Nepal, DoE 2012). In this context, in particular, children in urban squatter settlements face more severe adversities and risks as most are deprived of government services because of a lack of official national identification.

Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how the increase in food prices in Pakistan in 2008-2010 affected children's school enrollment and labor. The causal identification relies on geographical variations in the price of food (wheat). The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrollment differ by gender, economic status, and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labor because the transition from being idle to labor activity or from school to being idle are significant, particularly among the poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural land are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on children's education.

This paper begins by introducing Meme ‘Haylain’ Happiness, a concept drawn from a Bhutanese folktale about an old man, Meme Haylay Haylay, who exchanges his turquoise for a song, and happily returns home singing the song. It questions whether we are ready to pursue happiness in our daily life like Meme Haylay Haylay who had realized that more happiness would flow from singing a song than from guarding the turquoise. The paper then explores the roles of Bhutanese oral tradition in educating children who could not avail themselves of either monastic or modern education. It argues that modern education, which primarily provides secular, pluralistic, egalitarian and market values necessary for running economic, political and legal institutions and the machinery of the modern nation-state is deficient in many ways; it is the oral tradition which fills this gap by inculcating universal, humanistic and Bhutanese values. It also discusses the main functions of Bhutanese folktales which are about trivial events but embedded with multi-layered meanings of great moral and social importance, with experiences drawn from daily life. The common motifs of the tales are chosen to relate them to the daily realities of the Bhutanese people. Lastly, this paper makes some policy recommendations to promote, document, disseminate and study the Bhutanese folktales through the mass media such as the press, radio, TV, internet, and film industry.

Between 1996 and 2006, Nepal experienced violent civil conflict as a consequence of a Maoist insurgency, which many argue also brought about an increase in female empowerment. This paper exploits variations in exposure to conflict by birth cohort, survey date, and district to estimate the impact of the insurgency on education outcomes. Overall conflict intensity, measured by conflict casualties, is associated with an increase in female educational attainment, whereas abductions by Maoists, which often targeted school children, have the reverse effect. Male schooling tended to increase more rapidly in areas where the fighting was more intense, but the estimates are smaller in magnitude and more sensitive to specification than estimates for females. Similar results are obtained across different specifications, and robustness checks indicate that these findings are not due to selective migration.

Educational attainment in Pakistan has been historically low as compared to other countries in the region. Currently the primary net enrollment rate (NER) in Pakistan is sixty six percent which is far below that of some of the other countries in the region. It is also evident that there is great disparity within Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan which has a primary NER of fifty six percent as compared to the Punjab province which has a primary NER of seventy percent. This project examined various factors that influence enrollment decisions in Pakistan however; there have been relatively few recent studies that examine the determinants of schooling decisions and gender differentials in schooling in Balochistan. This analysis consists of three main components: (i) constructing profiles of children in Balochistan by schooling status; (ii) conducting a decomposition of variance of schooling status; and (iii) a logistic regression analysis to determine gender differentials in school enrollment. The project results suggest that for six - ten year olds in Balochistan the majority of variation in schooling status is explained between households rather than within households, while for eleven - fifteen year olds the majority of variation in schooling status is explained by within household differences. Poverty also plays a major role in determining whether or not a child is enrolled in school, as children belonging to the poorest wealth quintile in the six - ten age groups are four times more likely to be out of school than children in the richest wealth quintile.

This study reports the results of an impact evaluation of a pilot project implemented in 220 villages in Bajna block, Ratlam district, Madhya Pradesh (MP), India. The 30-month pilot was designed to improve early childhood development outcomes through: (a) creating awareness on child development issues among households and the community; (b) strengthening linkages between different service providers; (c) intensifying the connection between the community, panchayat (local governments), and service providers; (d) facilitating the formation of Village Resource Groups (VRGs) with representatives of the community, panchayat, and service providers to ensure better convergence and coordination of service delivery; (e) developing integrated village-level action plans around the needs of the child; and (f) advocating and lobbying with local, district, and state administration for flexible allocation of resources. The evaluation assessed the impact of the project on health, education, and nutrition milestones or outcomes or outputs identified for each stage of child development. This report is structured as follows: chapter one gives background; chapter two presents evaluation of the results of the pilot project; chapter three presents progress in processes and identified outcomes or milestones; and chapter four deals with Bachpan-lessons learned.

Most developing countries following independence opted for strong central control and direction of the education system, partly because of limited resources and the need to plan carefully and partly because of a felt need to create a sense of national unity among diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. This meant that key areas of control and decision making, such as management of resources and personnel, curriculum, evaluation of performance, and accountability, were under central rather than local control. The empowerment of schools has two major components: school-based management and the involvement of parents and communities in the work of schools. The emphasis given to one or other of these components depends on general national policy, local traditions, and context, with the result that almost every system is unique when one considers who makes decisions, the actual decisions that are made, the nature of those decisions, the level at which they are made, and relationships between levels. Thus, there are 'strong' and 'weak' versions of school empowerment. In some, only a single area of autonomy is granted to schools, while in others the community management of schools, even the establishment of schools, is encouraged (World Bank, 2007). In this paper, the author will briefly outline the history of school empowerment in Sri Lanka with particular reference to the Program for School Improvement (PSI), which commenced in 2006. The final section of the paper contains suggestions designed to strengthen process of empowering Sri Lankan schools and improving education outcomes.