Can Targeted Allocation of Teachers Improve Student Learning Outcomes? Evidence from Malawi

Teachers are one of the most important inputs for learning, but in many low-income countries they are poorly distributed between schools. This paper discusses the case of Malawi, which has introduced new evidence-based policies and procedures to improve the equity and efficiency of the allocation of teachers to schools. The analysis finds that adherence to these policies has been highly variable between the country’s districts, with the most successful deploying 75 percent of teachers according to the rules and the least successful just 22 percent. Using administrative data, the paper identifies the impacts on student repetition rates of reductions in pupil–qualified teacher ratios as a result of the new teachers. The findings show that schools that moved from having more than 90 pupils per qualified teacher to a lower ratio experienced reductions in lower primary school repetition rates of 2–3 percentage points. However, similar impacts on dropout are not observed.