An analysis of learning outcomes across Brazil’s nearly 6,000 subnational education systems shows that, despite wide variation, some systems achieve notably strong results. Yet high-performing systems are mostly small or mid-sized, while large systems struggle. This brief argues that implementation challenges are a central driver of these underwhelming results, and offers recommendations.

This study looks at how parents can help young children (ages 3-5) develop important skills, like math and reading (phonics), especially in low- and middle-income countries where there aren't many programs aimed at improving home learning. The researchers conducted an experiment to test an intervention that encourages parents to teach these skills at home.

This article presents new systematic analysis of the gap between education policy and practice across 50 countries during COVID-19, a time of substantial policy innovation.

Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. This paper provides the most recent and comprehensive review of the literature on effective education programs, with a novel emphasis on cost-effectiveness, covering the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions from over 200 impact evaluations across 52 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on education globally, with extended school closures posing significant challenges, particularly in Brazil. In this policy brief, we provide policy recommendations and evidence supporting them based on the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This policy brief aims to assist municipalities in Brazil in improving their childcare systems by strategically addressing their current capabilities, understanding child vulnerability comprehensively, and acknowledging that this reorganisation is a fundamental initial step in addressing childcare access challenges.

Targeted instruction is one of the most effective educational interventions in low- and middle-income countries, yet reported impacts vary by an order of magnitude. We study this variation and use the results to inform a new randomised trial.

Read the DeliverEd project's final report Deliberate disrupters.

This paper studies mid-level bureaucracies: organisations operating between national and street levels that are commonly tasked with implementation of sector plans. We examine how these bureaucracies approach policy implementation, how they perform, and the relationship between the two.

This paper outlines the global pattern in pandemic school-closure periods and illustrates data needs through the examples drawn from Brazil and India, both of which experienced prolonged periods of school closures.

High-frequency granular data can enable senior government officials to hold poorly performing members of the service delivery chain to account; however, centralised management must translate large volumes of data into appropriate management actions to be effective. 

This report synthesises the findings of a multi-country, multi-team research project into the effectiveness of delivery approaches at improving education service delivery. The main countries studied were Ghana, Jordan, and Pakistan, with smaller studies in Sierra Leone and a soon-to-be-completed study in Tanzania.

This note on policy delivery in Sierra Leone is one of a series of research products that are being produced as part of the DeliverEd Initiative. This note is based on a qualitative analysis of a small number of semi-structured interviews with government officials and partner organizations working with the delivery unit.

Governments around the world have sought to strengthen accountability for results in the public sector by introducing central or sector-specific delivery approaches, such as delivery units.This retrospective study investigates the assumption that these delivery units could improve performance by enhancing accountabilityrelationships within the system.