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The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the country's education budget. We find large positive effects on test scores at younger grades that persist at least two years. We show that these effects are concentrated among schools that focused funds on human resources improvements rather than school materials, suggesting that teachers and principals may be a central determinant of school quality.
Authors
Research Fellow Yale University
Costas is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at University College London.
Research Fellow University College London
Pedro is a Professor of Economics at University College London and an economist in the IFS' Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap).
Oswald Koussihouèdé
Nathalie Lahire
Corina Mommaerts
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.cem.2015.1515
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
Carneiro, P et al. (2015). Decentralizing education resources: school grants in Senegal. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/decentralizing-education-resources-school-grants-senegal (accessed: 9 May 2024).
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