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EMPIRICALMonthly Brief on Relevant Data for Leaders in Government February 2018
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"The new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its indicator framework set a high standard for national and international information systems. Monitoring the implementation of, and progress towards, the multiple components of the stand alone education goal (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4) requires quality data. Defining the standards of quality data production and assessing the quality of data for this purpose are challenges underlying the national and international monitoring mechanisms already in place. In particular, what changes need to occur and by whom are critical questions to obtaining viable cross nationally-comparable data on education. During the process of developing indicators and producing data, countries and advisory groups called for transparency and appropriate documentation of statistical processes. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and its partner agencies are major contributors in terms of data collection, indicator development and strengthening of national data systems for quality monitoring of SDG 4. Given the gap between national statistical capacities and the stringent set of expectations for quality data production, the UIS is providing national stakeholders with the methodologies and instruments they need to face the monitoring challenge of the SDG 4 agenda." READ MORE>>
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“At present rates, the global 2030 Universal Health Coverage (UHC) targets under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals will not be met. Urgent action is needed to speed progress in the two dimensions of UHC, health service coverage and financial protection, and to ensure that no one is left behind. What can be done? First, countries can learn from past experience. This report identifies a set of factors common among countries that made outstanding progress on selected service coverage and financial protection indicators between 2000 and 2015. By adapting proven approaches to their own settings, and by addressing stubborn implementation bottlenecks, countries can accelerate progress towards UHC. Second, even as they benefit from models of success, countries must prepare to manage deeper health system transformation now on the horizon. Spurred by economic, technological, demographic, and epidemiologic forces, these transformations will reshape the landscape in which countries pursue their 2030 UHC goals, creating new risks but also opportunities.” READ MORE>>
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"This paper presents the largest globally comparable panel database of education quality. The database includes 163 countries and regions over 1965-2015. The globally comparable achievement outcomes were constructed by linking standardized, psychometrically-robust international and regional achievement tests. The paper contributes to the literature in the following ways: (1) it is the largest and most current globally comparable data set, covering more than 90 percent of the global population; (2) the data set includes 100 developing areas and the most developing countries included in such a data set to date -- the countries that have the most to gain from the potential benefits of a high-quality education; (3) the data set contains credible measures of globally comparable achievement distributions as well as mean scores; (4) the data set uses multiple methods to link assessments, including mean and percentile linking methods, thus enhancing the robustness of the data set; (5) the data set includes the standard errors for the estimates, enabling explicit quantification of the degree of reliability of each estimate; and (6) the data set can be disaggregated across gender, socioeconomic status, rural/urban, language, and immigration status, thus enabling greater precision and equity analysis. A first analysis of the data set reveals a few important trends: learning outcomes in developing countries are often clustered at the bottom of the global scale; although variation in performance is high in developing countries, the top performers still often perform worse than the bottom performers in developed countries; gender gaps are relatively small, with high variation in the direction of the gap; and distributions reveal meaningfully different trends than mean scores, with less than 50 percent of students reaching the global minimum threshold of proficiency in developing countries relative to 86 percent in developed countries. The paper also finds a positive and significant association between educational achievement and economic growth. The data set can be used to benchmark global progress on education quality, as well as to uncover potential drivers of education quality, growth, and development." READ MORE>>
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“There are severe geographical disparities in pupil-teacher ratios (PTR) across Malawi, with most teachers concentrated near commercial centers and in rural schools with better amenities. Most of the variation in PTR is concentrated in small sub-district areas, suggesting a central role for micro-geographic factors in teacher distribution. Employing administrative data from several government sources, regression analysis reveals that school-level factors identified by teachers as desirable are closely associated with PTR, including access to roads, electricity, and water, and distance to the nearest trading center, suggesting a central role for teachers' interests in PTR variation. Political economy network mapping reveals that teachers leverage informal networks and political patronage to resist placement in remote schools, while administrative officials are unable to stand up to these formal and informal pressures, in part because of a lack of reliable databases and objective criteria for the allocation of teachers. This study curates a systematic database of the physical placement of all teachers in Malawi and links it with data on school facilities and geo-spatial coordinates of commercial centers. The study develops a consistent and objective measure of school remoteness, which can be applied to develop policies to create rules for equitable deployments and targeting of incentives. Growing awareness of disparities in PTRs among district education officials is already showing promising improvements in targeting of new teachers. Simulation results of planned policy applications show significant potential impacts of fiscally-neutral approaches to targeted deployments of new cohorts, as well as retention of teachers through data-calibrated incentives.“ READ MORE>>
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