Equal opportunities to enhance growth

Half of the students in low- and middle-income countries fail to achieve minimum learning levels in core subject areas like literacy and numeracy. This learning crisis reduces productivity by close to a third in developing countries. Nobel prize winners Duflo, Banerjee and Kremer have produced evidence on the effectiveness of different strategies to address the learning crisis. Experimental evaluations show that teacher incentives created by linking employment contracts to performance and accountability, and face-to-face training strategies focused in specific subjects, are effective strategies to improve student learning. Randomized trials also show that complementing education systems with tutors or computer assisted learning to make instruction more relevant to the current level of students’ competences has a significant impact on learning outcomes, particularly among lagging students.