Ongoing
work:
Secondary
Education Quality and Access Enhancement Project (SEQAEP),
Baseline survey:
The World Bank, Bangladesh and Data Analysis and
Technical Assistance
Background:
Bangladesh has achieved impressive progress in poverty
reduction and certain human development outcomes. Per capita GDP growth has
been above 5% since early 2000s, while headcount poverty has declined from
59% in 1991 to 40% in 2006. Gross primary enrolment rate is around 90
percent, secondary enrolment has more than doubled since independence, and
the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) gender parity target has already been
achieved at both the primary and secondary education level. These are all
remarkable feats when compared to countries at similar level of income in
the region. At the secondary level, the Ministry of Education (MOE)
oversees a unique system of public-private partnership which combines public
financing with private provision of education. More than 98 percent of the
secondary schools are managed and operated by the private sector with
financial support from the government. Furthermore, the Government of
Bangladesh (GoB) has launched several reform measures in the education
sector. GoB, with support from a series of programmatic Education Sector
Development Support Credits from the World Bank, has been implementing a
comprehensive policy reform agenda to ensure systemic improvement in
governance, quality and relevance of secondary education.
To address demand side constraints, initially focusing on low
female participation rates in secondary schooling, GoB with support from
development partners, implemented the Female Secondary Stipends program
which provides stipends and tuition waivers to female students throughout
the country except in four major metropolitan areas – conditional upon
maintaining regular attendance, passing grades, and remaining unmarried
while in secondary school. Subsequently the female-to-male ratio increased
from 62% in 1992 to 114% in 2006 (i.e. share of females in total enrolments
is now close to 55 percent, compared to under 40 percent in early 1990s).
Despite these achievements, there remain significant challenges in quality,
inclusion of poor children, institutional capacity, and monitoring and
evaluation.
The new stipend project proposes to: (a) improve education
quality and the capacity to monitor learning outcomes in project areas
through: (i) give incentive awards to students, schools and teachers to
improve academic performance; (ii) assess educational quality outcomes
through regular testing of students; and (iii) provide water and sanitation
facilities; (b) improve equitable access in project areas mainly through
proxy means testing (PMT) of potential students; (c) strengthen the
institutional capacity of MOE both at central and local levels, and (d)
establish an effective monitoring and evaluation system. The success of the
project will be assessed via several outcomes: i) increasing completion
rates in secondary school cycle; ii) increase pass rates in SSC exams; iii)
increase the number of pupils appearing for the SSC exam; iv) strengthen the
institutional capacity to monitor learning level; v) improving gender
balance; and vi) increasing the share of poor children enrolled in secondary
schools.
Objectives:
While a wide array of econometric techniques will be used to
infer impact of various project interventions to outcomes, the most rigorous
causal inference will be established on the impact of the PMT intervention.
While all project upazilas will share common project interventions from the
start of the project, only a subset of randomly picked upazilas will receive
the PMT intervention during the first year. Out of the 121 FSSAP-II
upazilas, means-tested conditional stipends for both girls and boys will be
implemented only in 60 randomly chosen upazilas during the first year of the
project, while the remaining upazilas will operate under the existing FSSAP-II
modality. Targeting will be scaled-up to cover all 121 IDA upazilas from
the second year of the project onwards. Control groups will come not only
from the 61 randomly chosen upazilas which did not get the intervention
during the first year, but from a matched subset from remaining upazilas
under GoB funding which will continue operating under the old system for at
least the next few years. This is the first time in Bangladesh that
PMT-type implementation will be experimented on such a large scale. It is
imperative that we established not only causal impact of this CCT on
enrollments (and other outcomes such as learning outcomes), we must assess
the efficiency of this targeting modality. Lessons learned from the
evaluation will not only help to inform scaling-up of PMT in IDA-funded
upazilas, but for the rest of the country as well.
The research indicators and outcomes indicators associated
with the PMT component is as follows:
1. Was it well targeted?
2. What was the fraction of households which misreported
their actual assets?
3. Did it bring in more pupils to secondary school from poor
households?
4. Did it improve the gender balance in secondary school
enrollments?
5. What happened to girls who no longer receive the stipend
because they were identified as belonging to non-poor households?
6. Did it improve the grade transition rate of pupils from
poor households?
7. Did it improve quality of learning (examination results,
numeracy and literacy assessments) of pupils from poor households? Did it
have any adverse impact on quality of learning on pupils from non-poor
households?
8. What was the impact on child (female and male) labor
supply and time-use?
Our tasks in this
project (SEQAEP)...............
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Strengthening
Dairy Value Chain Project, CARE Bangladesh (Baseline survey):
CARE Bangladesh, IFPRI and
and Data Analysis and Technical Assistance
Overall objectives:
-
To design the monitoring and
evaluation system/framework for the project
-
To design the baseline framework
and conduct the baseline research accordingly
-
Conduct mid-term evaluation of
the project at the end of the second year
-
Conduct the impact
assessment of the project
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Labor Migration As An Intervention: Mitigating Severe Seasonal Deprivation
in North-Western Bangladesh (3
Round survey):
The University
of Sydney, Australia and Data Analysis and Technical Assistance
This is a
panel Survey on “Labor Migration As An Intervention: Mitigating Severe
Seasonal Deprivation in North-Western Bangladesh", funded by The University
of Sydney, Australia. Field survey and data input of 1st round is complete.
Preparation for data delivery process (consistency checking, file labeling)
is ongoing.
Fuel Subsidies to the Poor
Bangladeshi Farmers (Phase I & II):
The World Bank, Bangladesh Institute of Development
Studies and Data Analysis and Technical Assistance
Overall objectives:
The overall objective of the study is to
determine the impact of the increase of the price of inputs on farmers and
of the intended diesel subsidies and to assess
options of institutional mechanism for delivering the subsidies to farmers.
More specifically,
a study shall be undertaken to understand the following and make
recommendations based on them for options for institutional mechanisms.
- Determine the impact on farmers following the increase
in the prices of energy and fertilizer as well as the increase in the
price of rice
- Identify the characteristics of the small and marginal
farmers that are more likely to be affected by the increase in price
Provide policy
options, based on international experience and the results of the study for
determining the target groups and modalities of disbursement
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Rapid Survey
for Food Price Impacts:
The World Bank, Bangladesh and Data Analysis and
Technical Assistance
The purpose of this work
is to field a short household and community survey to a national sample of
Bangladeshi households and conducting analysis on the data, to provide
insights on key issues related to the impact of high rice prices in
Bangladesh, particularly on the poor.
The survey will be
conducted with the understanding that rapid data collection and analysis are
critical to get a better understanding of the short-term impact of food
price rises which can be timely support to the Government and all donors who
would like provide aid to mitigate the impact and help households cope with
the shock.
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Addressing
Extreme Poverty in Bangladesh – the Case of Monga:
The World Bank, Bangladesh and Data Analysis and
Technical Assistance
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