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In many low- and lower-middle-income countries, key barriers to girls' secondary school access and learning include poverty, school inaccessibility, poor school quality, and lack of gender-sensitive practices in the classroom. The nongovernmental organization, Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), provides a range of financial, pedagogical, and community-supported interventions aimed at removing these barriers in government secondary schools in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Using longitudinal data, we adopt quasi-experimental methods to examine the impact of the CAMFED program on reducing secondary school dropout and improving test scores in English and mathematics. Results suggest that the CAMFED program has a significant effect on both improving access and learning for the most disadvantaged adolescent girls. However, low-performing learners remain particularly at risk of dropout, necessitating further consideration and support for these girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most countries are far from achieving the new sustainable development target of equal access to higher education by 2030, with those in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa furthest behind. This raises questions about the allocation of public resources across the education system to promote equity. We use data from Demographic and Health Surveys and UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 31 countries in these regions to assess who benefits from public spending on education. Our results reveal an overall pattern of pro-rich education spending, increasing with education level. We find that this pattern can be traced to an allocation of resources to higher education that is disproportionate to the sub-sector’s size: even when higher education spending overall represents a small proportion of total educational expenditure, per-capita expenditure is extremely high. Given that the richest predominantly gain access to higher education, the current spending patterns are likely to reinforce wealth-driven education inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many low- and lower-middle-income countries, private schools are often considered to offer better quality of education than government schools. Yet, there is a lack of evidence to date on their role in reducing inequalities: namely, the extent to which private schooling improves learning among the most disadvantaged children. Our paper uses household survey data from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to identify whether any observed impact of private schooling on core literacy and numeracy skills differs according to children’s household wealth. We demonstrate wealth gaps in access to private schooling, and use inferential models to account for observable differences between those who do and do not enrol in private schools. In Kenya and Uganda, we find that private schooling appears to improve the chances of children learning relative to their peers in government schools, but the chances of the poorest children learning in private schools remains low and is at best equivalent to the richest learning in government schools. In Tanzania, private schooling does not seem to improve poorer children’s learning, whereas it does for richer children. These findings raise a caution about the extent to which private provision can help narrow learning inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education is back in the spotlight, with post-2015 sustainable development goals emphasising equality of access. In this paper, we highlight the long distance still to travel to achieve the goal of equal access to higher education for all, with a focus on poorer countries which tend to have lower levels of enrolment in higher education. Analysing Demographic and Health Survey data from 35 low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, we show wide wealth inequalities in particular, with few if any of the poorest gaining access to higher education in some countries. We further identify that wealth and gender inequalities interact and tend to be wider in countries where levels of higher education are higher. This implies that expansion in access to higher education may predominantly benefit the rich, unless measures are taken to tackle inequalities. We find that that the rates of increase necessary for the attainment of the equal access goal by 2030 are particularly high. They pose a particularly difficult challenge given the access inequalities present from primary and secondary education in a wide majority of countries in our analysis. We therefore suggest that any measures aimed at attaining the goal need to tackle inequalities in access within a system-wide approach, focusing on the level of education at which inequalities initially manifest, alongside higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]