Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre

A. Research Themes Of The Project

Poverty often leads to inferior educational outcomes. Those outcomes in turn play a major role in determining the future incidence and extent of poverty. The core objective of the proposed research is to study the mechanisms that drive this cycle of deprivation, and to identify the policies needed to ensure that educational outcomes benefit the disadvantaged. Simple expansion of education does not necessarily benefit the poor. During this five-year research programme more children than ever before – particularly those from poor households - will be moving through schooling and training to become working youths and adults. Their fortunes will be affected not only by their educational experiences, but also by the broader context of welfare and opportunity that they confront. The multi-sectoral objectives of the Millennium Development Goals acknowledge this inter-dependence. Yet its nature and strength are not fully understood, and judgements about priorities for policy change, or about their sequencing, are not always firmly based. Accordingly, how to promote good educational outcomes for the poor, as tools for social inclusion and for improving lives and livelihoods, is a central question across our proposed research. The work will focus upon the circumstances of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - the two regions where the challenge of achieving the MDG objective of halving world poverty by 2015 is greatest and where the policy benefits are most urgently required.

We propose three inter-linked research themes, under which new policy-relevant knowledge will be produced:

Cognitive, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. The most direct and fundamental outcomes of education are the cognitive and non-cognitive skills which it helps to create. These include literacy, numeracy, reasoning ability, and the behavioural traits, attitudes and values necessary for effective life in the community. The research will investigate the ways in which aspects of the structure and characteristics of school systems can improve these outcomes in pro-poor ways.

Social and life outcomes of education include its impact upon health, nutrition, and fertility behaviour. Health and longevity are cherished human outcomes and any positive impact of education on these may be deemed of incalculable benefit. High fertility rates limit the potential extent of poverty-reduction arising from economic growth and burden the environment. Much is known about these relationships, but very important gaps remain. A central objective of our proposed research will be to show how the causal impact of education on health , including HIV/AIDS, and on fertility can be improved, especially for the poor.

Economic and market outcomes. It is well known that education plays a central role in job allocation, and that in all societies, those people having more education face wider job-choice and a likelihood of faster earnings growth. It is also known that these outcomes are influenced not only by the level of education attained but also by learning outcomes – for example by the depth of literacy and numeracy skills achieved. It is likely that the strength of both the allocative and the behavioural effects of education change as access to it widens. Yet, much of present knowledge is adduced from static contexts. Our research will focus upon dynamic dimensions which are much less known - upon how these educational outcomes have been changing, upon how they relate to broader patterns of social and economic development – including the changing role of the state in education - and upon how this has affected the poor.

Two cross-theme issues will be, firstly, explaining patterns of inclusion and exclusion, including their gendered outcomes, and secondly, examining the ways in which different forms of aid support influence educational outcomes.

B. The Research Consortium (www.educ.cam.ac.uk/recoup/index.html)

The Centre for Commonwealth Education (CCE), University of Cambridge will lead the consortium, working closely with institutions in Ghana, Kenya, India, Pakistan and two core partners in the UK. The CCE has been established to investigate and explain – through research, policy analysis, communication and teaching – the causes of current education problems, and the connections between education and broader patterns of social and economic development in Commonwealth countries. It draws upon strong cross-disciplinary expertise from the Cambridge Faculties of Education and of Economics and from the Department of Development Studies, each of which have long traditions of research on problems of education and development. At CCE, research inputs will be provided by Professor Madeleine Arnot, Professor Christopher Colclough, Dr Shaila Fennell, Dr Martyn Rouse and Dr Kenneth Ruthven.

The Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), University of Oxford is a leading international research institute whose research draws upon primary data sets from many African countries. CSAE is currently assisting the Africa Commission in its work. The Centre has a strong doctoral programme, and many former students are now employed in African universities and in the international financial institutions. CSAE is home to the Journal of African Economies. The lead academics at CSAE will be Professor John Knight, Dr. Francis Teal and Dr Geeta Kingdon . They have a proven track-record of producing influential research on education policy issues in Africa and South Asia.

The University of Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies (CAS) is UK’s leading specialist centre for the interdisciplinary study of Africa. Its staff have conducted DFID and ESRC-funded research programmes on education, skills and enterprise development, and on poverty and social development in Africa over two decades. The lead academics at CAS will be Professor Kenneth King, Dr. Neil Thin and Dr. James Smith. The university’s Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS), coordinates interdisciplinary teaching and research for a substantial number of scholars. Its members have participated in several large cross-disciplinary research projects with education as a theme. Professor Roger Jeffery, from CSAS, will be part of the University of Edinburgh team.

Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), Ahmedabad, India is a premier development research organisation in India, supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Research on Human Development within GIDR focuses on population, labour and poverty issues, including studies of quality of life, education, and health. The lead academics at GIDR will be Professors Jeemol Unni and Leela Visaria. They are intellectual leaders in their fields in India and bring substantial labour-market and demographic expertise to the consortium.

Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Centre (MHDC), Islamabad, Pakistan is a policy research think-tank committed to the promotion of human development in South Asia. It produces well-known annual South Asia Human Development Reports. The lead academic at MHDC will be Dr Faisal Bari, who is also Head of the Economics Department at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Dr. Bari will draw on expertise from Dr Haris Gazdar and from Dr A.R. Kemal of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.

Institute for Development Studies (IDS), Nairobi, Kenya is one of the best-known and longest established institutes of development research in Africa. The lead researchers here will be Professor Njuguna Ng’ethe and Professor Germano Mwabu, Chair of the Department of Economics, who has produced distinguished work on the labour market outcomes of education. Ms. Ruth Kagia, Director of Education at the World Bank, will contribute to the fieldwork and subsequent analysis. The World Bank Research Department has agreed, in principle, to provide some financial support for the Kenya research programme.

Associates for Change (AFC), Accra, Ghana is a leading research and consulting institute in Ghana, employing a multi disciplinary approach to the analysis of poverty, education, gender equity and public sector reform. AFC has a record of good quality, timely research and considerable experience in research management. The lead academics will be Dr. Leslie Casely-Hayford and Professor Jerome Siau Djangmah.

The work will also benefit from collaborative links in South Africa with the Education Policy Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand and the Centre for Education Policy Development, Johannesburg, in China with both the Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong University and in the UK with the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT). Staff from these institutions will be involved in some aspects of the work on education financing, on non-state provision and on gendered outcomes.

The Consortium Director will be Professor Christopher Colclough, who is also Director of CCE. He is a development economist who has published extensively on problems of education in developing countries. As a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, he designed and directed a multi-country research programme on gender and primary schooling in Africa, financed by the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and several bilateral agencies. This involved recruiting and leading nine national research teams from the sub-continent and implementing a substantial publication and capacity-building programme. Amongst advisory assignments for many governments and agencies, he served as consultant to the Department of Education in South Africa 1994-2000, providing advice on financing the new government’s education policies. More recently he was the founding director at UNESCO of the Global Monitoring Report on Education for All. Over the period 2002-4 he was responsible for producing this independent annual report which charts global progress towards the six ‘Dakar’ goals and the two Millennium Development goals for education and gender parity.