World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report draws on OPM-managed education research project

Each year, the World Bank releases a World Development Report (WDR) focusing on a particular aspect of development. This year the theme is education.

The 2018 WDR aims to ‘take stock of what we know and to provide guidance on how to expand the scope and quality of education around the world’, as well as preparing the ground for more sustained policy decisions – and it includes over 80 references to papers written by 24 authors related to the RISE programme.

RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) is a large-scale, multi-country research programme that aims to expand the evidence base on education systems, and is managed and implemented by Oxford Policy Management (OPM) in partnership with the Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford) and the Center for Global Development (Washington DC). The work of many of RISE’s researchers has been instrumental in influencing the World Bank’s development of 2018’s WDR, which shares many core themes with the RISE Programme.

“The release of the WDR is a milestone in the struggle to prepare the youth of today for the challenges of the world they will face,” says Lant Pritchett, RISE Research Director, “The report focuses on both the need to ‘get education right’ and how to reform education systems to meet the challenge of preparing today’s youth to be tomorrow’s citizens, parents, community members, workers, and leaders.”

A key theme in this year’s WDR is the ineffectiveness of schooling in many countries to teach numeracy and literacy, and the WDR emphasises that entire education systems, rather than individual policies, will need to change to reverse this – as RISE also argues in ‘The Pivot from Schooling to Education’, and elsewhere.

The RISE researchers cited in this WDR include RISE Research Director Lant Pritchett, RISE Senior Researcher Justin Sandefur, a number of RISE Intellectual Leadership Team members and many researchers from the RISE Country Research Teams.

Read RISE’s commentary the full report, and follow @riseprogramme for more updates.

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