Center for International Development (CID)  Student Ambassador Abeela Latif interviews Niharika Singh, Ph.D. Student Affiiate, and Zainab Qureshi, Senior Program Manager, both at Harvard University's Evidence for Policy Design Program.

About the Talk: Despite significant progress in enrollment and educational access, learning outcomes in Pakistan remain vastly substandard. At the same time, the country’s education landscape has changed dramatically with the mushrooming growth of low cost private schools, estimated to cater to 42% of school going children today. Evidence for Policy Design’s Learning and Education Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) program is leading transformational research to understand the impacts of these changes, and examining how to catalyze innovation in the education ecosystem of Pakistan. This talk will outline the LEAPS team’s research on how to alleviate system-level constraints to improve education quality and student learning outcomes. Lead researchers on LEAPS are Tahir Andrabi (Pomona), Jishnu Das (World Bank) and Asim Khwaja (Harvard Kennedy School).

See the presentation: Education in Pakistan: What Works to Improve Learning Outcomes?

www.cid.harvard.edu / Interview recorded on November 3rd, 2017 as part of the CID Speaker Series and cross-posted with permission. © Center for International Development at Harvard University

About the interviewees:

Niharika Singh is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Harvard University and co-principal investigator on a LEAPS study examining the effects of providing unconditional cash grants to rural low cost private schools in Pakistan. Her research interests span a range of topics in development and labor economics. She received her BA in Economics from McGill University and worked as a research assistant in India and the U.S. prior to graduate school.

Zainab Qureshi is the LEAPS Senior Program Manager at EPoD, overseeing implementation of Education and policy research in Pakistan. She has previously worked at various organizations across the Education sector in Pakistan, implementing low cost Education delivery programs and developing an alternate model of education for low income schools. She holds a Master’s in Education (Ed.M.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in Economics and International Development from McGill University.