All posts by Ravinder Casley Gera

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About Ravinder Casley Gera

Education Consultant, specialising in sector and school finance, the determinants of learning in lower primary, and impact evaluation. Currently at the World Bank.

Malawi Education Reform Program

Projects

I’m excited to have co-led the preparation of the Malawi Education Reform Program (MERP), the largest-ever World Bank investment in primary education in Malawi. Co-financed by the Global Partnership for Education as well as the Government of Malawi, MERP represents the culmination of five years’ research and impact evaluation in Malawi and scales up pilot interventions with proven success in raising learning outcomes. Focusing on improving learning environments in lower primary, the US$210 million project will provide finance to more than 3,000 severely overcrowded schools to construct low-cost classrooms and hire auxiliary teachers; train and appoint Learner Mentors in 2,500 schools to support female learners; provide training to more than 9,000 head teachers and deputies to manage schools in resource-constrained conditions; and provide results-based finance to support improvements in teacher distribution and on-time delivery of grants to schools.

You can read more about MERP here.

The project comprises of six components. The first component, expanding and reforming primary school improvement grants (PSIG) supports the expansion and reform of PSIG, which is the primary source of discretionary finance to schools, to provide additional and more needs-based support to schools, with timely and predictable delivery of finance, building on the successful pilot under Malawi Education Sector Improvement Project (MESIP). The second component, improved learning environments in lower primary to support learning recovery after Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) will provide finance targeted to schools with exceptional need (MERP SIG), to support construction of low-cost classrooms and latrines, and hiring of auxiliary teachers. It consists of following sub-components: (i) low-cost construction; (ii) auxiliary teachers; and (iii) hardship school’s support. The third component, supporting girls’ learning supports a range of activities to raise the learning achievement of girls, including supporting female learners and improving the numbers of female teachers in schools in remote areas. The fourth component, school leadership program (SLP) will support the national delivery of an updated SLP supporting headteachers, deputy headteachers, Primary Education Adviser (PEAs), inspectors, and selected female section heads. The fifth component, project coordination and capacity building will finance the management of the project, including reporting. The sixth component, contingent emergency response is primarily intended to enable the government to take steps to prevent or manage a resurgence of COVID-19 in schools but also eligible for use for any other eligible crisis or emergency as defined in the International Development Association (IDA) financing agreement.

“Fiscal Implications of Free Education: The Case of Tanzania”

Research

The abolition of fees for secondary school is an increasingly common policy choice by even low-income countries, including Kenya, Uganda and Sierra Leone in recent years. Such policies can have a transformative effect on access, but have enormous fiscal implications. Without careful planning, countries which abolish secondary fees often end up with deeply unequal secondary school systems, with standards of staffing and infrastructure met in urban areas but largely ignored in rural areas.

Tanzania became one of the first low-income countries to abolish fees for lower secondary education (grades 8-12) in 2015. The new Fee-Free Basic Education Policy enabled a large increase in the proportion of students entering primary school, and the proportion progressing to secondary level. Over the next few years more than a million additional lower secondary places will be required to meet the increase in demand. While this is great news, such a rapid expansion poses significant cost challenges. In partnership with the government of Tanzania, we developed a simulation model to estimate the impacts of various policy parameters on the cost of lower secondary education up to 2025.

I wrote a Policy Note to accompany the model, presenting key projections for lower secondary costs, the additional costs of various improvements to school standards currently under discussion, and potential approaches to reduce costs without sacrificing quality of teaching. I presented the model and the Note at the Public Finance and Public Management Workshop, organized by the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, in Accra, Ghana in October 2018. The model is now being replicated for use in Uganda, Ghana, and other low- and middle-income countries in Africa and elsewhere.

Read the Note.

“Moving teachers to Malawi’s remote communities: a data-driven approach to teacher deployment”

Research

Proud to have (online) published my (co-authored) first (working) paper!

The product of more than two years of research, in close partnership with the Government of Malawi, the paper details the political economy factors driving the vast disparities in staffing between remote and more urban schools in Malawi, and the potential of data-driven policies, such as calibrated remote posting allowances, to address the problem. Look out for news of the rollout of new policies in Malawi over the next year or so.

Read the paper.

UPDATE 8th January 2019: The updated paper is now published in the International Journal of Educational Development.

UPDATE 1 August 2020: The paper received the Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on People of African Descent from the Comparative International Education Society. My thanks to the committee!

Tanzania Education Program for Results: Additional Financing

Projects

I have been privileged for the last two years to work on the Tanzania Education Program for Results, a highly innovative and terrifically well-designed program of support to basic education. Program for Results (PforR) is the World Bank’s modality for results-based financing, and the Tanzania EPforR was the first PforR in education anywhere in the world. By rewarding the Government of Tanzania for implementing priority programs and reforms, the PforR approach has worked extremely well in aligning donor and government incentives, driving significant change at both central and local level.

In May, the World Bank and GoT signed an agreement for an additional $80 million in financing to extend the program to 2020 and support expansion into new areas of reform, including some very interesting new approaches to school inspections. I worked extensively alongside the Government and colleagues from the Bank and other donors to develop the design for the AF phase [pdf].

Read the project paper, or find out more about the program.

Admitting NGO failure: a (fictional) example

NGO communications

I wrote a piece for WhyDev imagining, probably slightly idealistically, how an NGO could gently but frankly inform its supporters about an unsuccessful pilot project:

Friends,

At Partners Fighting Poverty, we never stop thinking about new ways to help the world’s most vulnerable farmers. Every year we try new approaches and new projects to help people earn more, learn more and live healthier, safer lives. This innovative approach has led us to some of our biggest successes, such as our unique plough-to-plate value chain financing system.

But when you try a lot of new things, inevitably some will work better than others. And a small number of projects won’t work at all.

I want to take a moment today to tell you about one recent project that didn’t work.

Realistic? Hopelessly naive? Or maybe you think this doesn’t go far enough in the direction of transparency? (That’s what the commenters seem to think.) Read the whole piece over at WhyDev.