Researchers evaluated the impact of hiring extra contract teachers in primary schools in India on student learning. Results show that students in schools with an extra contract teacher performed significantly better than those in comparison schools in both math and language areas. Evidence also suggests that contract teachers in this context faced stronger incentives to perform well than regular teachers.

In Uganda, researchers examined the impact of a combination of life skills and vocational training on adolescent girls’ engagement in income-generating activities, control over their bodies, and aspirations. The bundled provision of hard vocational and soft life skills training led to substantial advances in economic empowerment and control over the body for adolescent girls, which persisted for four years.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to measure the relative effectiveness of conditional versus unconditional bonuses on improving the quality of schools. Offering conditional incentives to individual teachers was a cost-effective way to improve student test scores across subjects.

Researchers partnered with Pratham, an educational NGO, to evaluate the impact of their “Read India” program and its components, which include teacher training, monitoring, learning materials, and village volunteers, on educational attainment. Preliminary results suggest the program had a modest impact on overall reading levels in the villages where camps were held, but a much larger impact on the subgroup of children that actually attended the camps.

Researchers in Bogotá, Colombia, evaluated whether changing the timing and type of CCTs could lead to greater impact on educational attainment. All CCT variations had similarly positive impacts on school attendance, but transfers conditional on continued education had a greater impact on secondary and tertiary school enrollment, particularly for the most at-risk children.

In Uganda, an incentivized community health promoter program increased health care access, knowledge, and health-promoting behaviors among households, leading to a 27 percent reduction in child mortality.

Women who received private access to vouchers for contraceptives were more likely to take up and use contraception, compared to women whose husbands were involved in the voucher program.

Researchers are testing whether giving vendors money to pay off their outstanding debts or offering financial literacy trainings can help break these borrowers' cycles of debt.

Researchers assessed whether the provision of health training alongside microfinance services impacted the health or financial behavior of Peruvian microcredit clients. They found that additional health training affected neither.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation of a bundled microcredit and health education program, delivered both to mixed-gender and female-only loan groups in Benin, to evaluate its impacts on health knowledge, health behaviors, and social outcomes. The integrated package of group microcredit and health education led to gains in women’s knowledge of both malaria and HIV/AIDS, but those gains did not translate into improvements in health behaviors.

In an ongoing evaluation, researchers are studying the relationship between teacher and student motivation, family participation, and student achievement in rural non-formal education (NFE) centers.

Researchers evaluated a multi-faceted approach aimed at improving long term income of the ultra-poor in Peru. They found that the approach had long-lasting economic and self-employment impacts and that the long-run benefits, measured in terms of household expenditures, outweighed their up-front costs.

In this randomized evaluation in Rajasthan, India, researchers examined the effectiveness of five interventions on police performance: limiting administrative transfers; rotating duties and days off; elevating community involvement; incorporating on-duty training; and implementing “decoy” visits by survey enumerators. While decoy visits and trainings improved police performance, the other three interventions were inconsistently implemented and had no detectable impact.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to measure the impact of publicly-funded private primary schools on student enrollment in rural Pakistan. The private school program significantly increased school enrollment, but did not reduce gender disparities among students.

Researchers examined the short-term responses of a grant to school committees and find that overall, parents increased participation and responsibility, but these efforts did not improve overall school quality. Enrollment at the lowest grades increased and school resources improved, but teacher absenteeism increased, and there was no impact on test scores.