Three Essays on Improving Learning Outcomes in Africa

Too often governments fail to provide access to quality public services to the poor. My work focuses on this issue and the bottlenecks that impede high-quality government provision of education in sub-Saharan African countries. Chapter 1 studies whether outsourcing public services to private entities improves service delivery in fragile states. It provides experimental evidence from the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which delegated management of 93 public schools to eight different private organizations. Within one academic year, outsourcing increased students scores in English and math by .18$\sigma$, relative to control schools. While the highest-performing providers generated increases in learning of \input{tables/alto_effect}\unskip$\sigma$, the lowest-performing providers had no impact on learning. Consistent with the rules of provider contracts, we find no evidence that providers engaged in student selection. However, providers were allowed to shift pupils from oversubscribed schools and underperforming teachers to other government schools. These results suggest that leveraging the private sector to improve service delivery in fragile states is promising, but they also highlight the importance of procurement rules and contracting details to aligning public and private interests.Chapter 2 studies cross-age tutoring --- in which older students tutor younger students --- as an inexpensive alternative for providing personalized instruction. Tutoring in math has a small positive effect on math test scores. The effect is concentrated among middle-ability students, suggesting that tutors are not able to help advanced learners and those lagging behind grade-level competencies.Chapter 3 studies complementarities across policies in education. While the idea that complementarities across policies can lead to increasing returns has a long tradition in economics, there is limited evidence that clearly identifies such complementarities. It presents evidence of the impact of providing schools with (a) unconditional capitation grants, (b) bonus payments to teachers based on student performance, and (c) both of the above. We find no impact on student learning from providing either the grants or teacher incentives but significant positive effects from providing both. We find strong evidence of complementarities between improving school inputs and teacher incentives, with the combined effect being greater than the sum of the individual effects