Assessing Barriers to Trade in Education Services in Developing Asia - Pacific Countries:An Empirical Exercise

The study, thus, touches only tip of an iceberg in terms of its analytical power to explain movement of students across nations. It points out to the definite existence of country specific barriers and from a pilot case study in India, highlights some of these possible barriers. However, future studies should be attempted to understand the extent of barriers to trade in education services through more intensive primary survey and bilateral country studies.Trade in Education Services, Asia-Pacific

The potential of mobile phones to transform teacher professional development

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and 10 million students

Ambulance Emergency Response Optimization in Developing Countries

The lack of emergency medical transportation is viewed as the main barrier to the access of emergency medical care in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this paper, we present a robust optimization approach to optimize both the location and routing of emergency response vehicles, accounting for uncertainty in travel times and spatial demand characteristic of LMICs. We traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the sixth largest and third most densely populated city in the world, to conduct field research resulting in the collection of two unique datasets that inform our approach. This data is leveraged to develop machine learning methodologies to estimate demand for emergency medical services in a LMIC setting and to predict the travel time between any two locations in the road network for different times of day and days of the week. We combine our robust optimization and machine learning frameworks with real data to provide an in-depth investigation into three policy-related questions. First, we demonstrate that outpost locations optimized for weekday rush hour lead to good performance for all times of day and days of the week. Second, we find that significant improvements in emergency response times can be achieved by re-locating a small number of outposts and that the performance of the current system could be replicated using only 30% of the resources. Lastly, we show that a fleet of small motorcycle-based ambulances has the potential to significantly outperform traditional ambulance vans. In particular, they are able to capture three times more demand while reducing the median response time by 42% due to increased routing flexibility offered by nimble vehicles on a larger road network. Our results provide practical insights for emergency response optimization that can be leveraged by hospital-based and private ambulance providers in Dhaka and other urban centers in LMICs

Open and distance learning for basic education in South Asia: its potential for hard to reach children and children in conflict and disaster areas

This is the main report in a UNICEF funded project which explores the ways in which, across South Asia, various forms of open and distance learning could be developed to better meet the needs of marginalised children and those affected by natural disaster and by conflic

What are the impacts and cost-effectiveness of strategies to improve performance of untrained and under-trained teachers in the classroom in developing countries?

What are the impacts and cost effectiveness of strategies to improve performance of untrained and under-trained teachers in the classroom in developing countries

Information and communication Technology and Poverty: An Asian Perspective

The emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet, has generated new enthusiasms about the development prospects for poor economies. Many now think that new technologies can provide a faster route to better livelihoods and improved quality of life than the one afforded by the standard process of industrialization. The opposing view holds that the focus on ICTs will detract attention from the more fundamental task of addressing the basic problems of economic developmentICT; poverty; growth

The politics of what works in service delivery:\ud An evidence-based review

This paper examines the evidence on the forms of politics likely to promote inclusive social provisioning and enable, as opposed to constrain, improvements in service outcomes. It focuses on eight relatively successful cases of delivery in a range of country contexts and sectors (roads, agriculture, health, education) where independent evaluations demonstrate improved outcomes. The paper traces the main characteristics of the political environment for these cases, from the national political context, to the politics of sector policymaking, to the micro politics of implementation. The findings indicate that it is possible to identify connections between good performance and better outcomes at the point of delivery and the main forms of politics operating at local, sector and national levels.\ud \ud A number of common factors underpinning successful delivery emerge strongly but need to be tested through further research. In particular, the paper highlights the relationship between inclusive delivery and periods of crisis and transition;the nature of the political settlement;the types of calculations of political returns being made by political actors at all levels, and; the extent to which the state derives or seeks to enhance its legitimacy through the provision of a particular service