The Next 10 Years: Education Policy in Low-Income Countries after COVID

About the speakers:

David Evans is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, working on education, health, and social safety nets. Previously he was at the World Bank, where he co-authored the World Development Report 2018, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, coordinated impact evaluation work for sub-Saharan Africa, and managed education projects in Brazil. Evans has evaluated education, early child development, agriculture, health, and social safety net programs in Brazil, the Gambia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. He received a PhD in economics from Harvard University, specializing in economic development and labor economics.

Nompumelelo Mohohlwane is an education researcher working as a deputy director in the Research Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate at the national Department of Basic Education, South Africa. The unit is responsible for system monitoring, supporting performance information management, and conducting research and evaluation of education interventions. She is part of the research team for the government led Early Grade Reading Study randomised control trials (2015-2018, 2018-2021).

She has a master’s degree (with distinction) in education from the University of Witwatersrand. Her studies focused on substantiating the contribution of randomised control trials (RCTs) to evaluating early grade reading acquisition using literature analysis and empirical data analysis of large sample data. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Stellenbosch, her study focuses on language in education policy. She recently co-authored research on the impact of coronavirus in South Africa, the latest report is titled “The impact of COVID-19 in education – more than a year of disruption (June 2021).

Nompumelelo is also a Center for Global Development non-resident fellow which lends its focus on providing solutions for poverty and improving efficiencies in education systems and informing global knowledge.

Pascaline Dupas a professor in the Department of Economics, a senior fellow at both the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute, and the faculty director of the Stanford King Center on Global Development. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society; an affiliate and board member of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab; a fellow at Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research; and an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action. Before coming to Stanford, Dupas was an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth and the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics.

Dupas focuses her research on scalable policies for improving household well-being in low income countries. Among other projects, she has conducted experiments throughout Africa to determine how best to price, target, and distribute essential health products. She received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and was named the Best French Economist by Le Monde in 2015. She is a past editor of the Journal of Development Economics, and currently sits on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics; and American Economic Review: Insights.