Impact Initiative: Recent submissions
Now showing items 281-300 of 778
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Investigating the Comprehension Iceberg: Developing Empirical Benchmarks for Early-grade Reading in Agglutinating African Languages
(AOSIS, 2020)Reading development in agglutinating African languages is a relatively under-researched area. While numerous studies highlight the low comprehension levels among learners reading in African languages in South Africa, little ... -
School Leadership and Management: Identifying Linkages with Learning and Structural Inequalities
(Springer, 2019)This chapter summarises three phases of research developments in South Africa that have successively brought more reliable quantitative evidence to bear on what we know about the linkages between school leadership and ... -
Academic Resilience in Challenging Contexts: Evidence from Township and Rural Primary Schools in South Africa
(Elsevier Ltd, 2019)Poverty is considered a risk factor that jeopardizes children’s academic performance. However, even in high-poverty contexts there are students who manage to achieve consistently good academic results. This paper uses a ... -
Addressing the 'Leadership Conundrum' Through a Mixed Methods Study of School Leadership for Literacy
(SAGE, 2019)This paper explores methodological insights from a mixed methods study that aims to understand how school leaders promote literacy development in their schools. The study findings consider both the complementarities and ... -
School Leadership and Local Learning Contexts in South Africa
(SAGE, 2018)International research has shown that the quality of school leadership and management (SLM) is important for teaching and learning, particularly in schools where there is acute resource deprivation. This article explores ... -
The Rise of the Economic Technocracy in Rwanda: A Case of a Bureaucratic Pocket of Effectiveness or State-building Prioritisation?
(The University of Manchester, 2019)The Rwandan Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN) is recognised as the most effective organisation in the Rwandan state. The objective of the paper is to understand the organisational ... -
The Challenge of Sustaining a Professional Civil Service Amidst Shifting Political Coalitions: The Case of the Ministry of Finance in Zambia, 1991-2018
(University of Manchester, 2019)Zambia experienced a decade of strong economic growth from 2004 to 2014, averaging 7.4 percent a year. This growth has been linked, first and foremost, to the rise of copper prices and international debt ... -
The Politics of State Capacity and Development in Africa: Reframing and Researching 'Pockets of Effectiveness'
(The University of Manchester, 2019)The role of bureaucratic ‘pockets of effectiveness’ (PoEs) in driving development is generating renewed interest within development studies and, to an extent, development policy. Existing ... -
The Politics of Central Banking in Kenya: Balancing Political and Developmental Interests
(The University of Manchester, 2019)This paper analyses the performance of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) in delivering on its mandate since the organisation gained formal independence in the early-1990s. It utilises a political ... -
Pockets of Effectiveness: The Contributions of Critical Political Economy and State Theory
(The University of Manchester, 2019)The pockets of effectiveness (PoEs) debates and political settlements literature are rooted in particular forms of political economy analysis. At one level, this is a positive contribution to the mainstream ... -
The Shifting Fortunes of the Economic Technocracy in Uganda: Caught Between State-building and Regime Survival?
(The University of Manchester, 2019)Uganda’s impressive levels of economic growth over most of the past three decades have often been linked to the performance of its economic technocracy, particularly the government’s ... -
The Politics of Bureaucratic 'Pockets of Effectiveness': Insights from Ghana's Ministry of Finance
(University of Manchester, 2019)Ghana’s Ministry of Finance (MoF) has been identified as a ‘pocket of effectiveness’, both in relation to other state agencies and in terms of delivering on its mandate. However, this effectiveness has ... -
Agricultural Policy Making in Kenya: Why Must Smallholders' Agency be Made Central?
(ESRC STEPS, 2019)Smallholder farming in Kenya is key to the country’s food security and economy. Small farms account for 75% of the total agricultural output. Yet smallholder farmers’ agency has been largely neglected in the five decades ... -
Relational Approaches to Poverty in Rural India: Social, Ecological and Technical Dynamics
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2020)Poverty is now widely recognised as multidimensional, with indicators including healthcare, housing and sanitation. Yet, relational approaches that foreground political-cultural processes remain marginalised in policy ... -
Sustainable Development through Diversifying Pathways in India
(Economic and Political Weekly, 2019)From groundwater depletion to toxic air pollution, modernising development pathways are linked with grave unsustainability challenges, as they extend the unbridled extraction of “goods” from nature while carelessly dumping ... -
Uncertainty
(Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2018)Environmental appraisal presents deeper and wider problems than are typically conceded in policy. Strong political pressures for decision justification routinely force the closing down of due deliberation over the real ... -
Aiming High and Falling Low: The SADA-Northern Ghana Millennium Village Project
(Elsevier, 2020)This article assesses the impact of the Northern Ghana Millennium Village Project. We estimate project effects on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) indicators using a difference-in-difference approach applied to ... -
A School Meals Program Implemented at Scale in Ghana Increases Height-for-Age during Midchildhood in Girls and in Children from Poor Households: A Cluster Randomized Trial
(Oxford University Press, 2019)Attention to nutrition during all phases of child and adolescent development is necessary to ensure healthy physical growth and to protect investments made earlier in life. Leveraging school meals programs as platforms to ... -
The effect of health insurance reform: Evidence from China
(Elsevier, 2019)This paper estimates the impact of a health insurance reform on health outcomes in urban China. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey1 we find that this reform increases the rate of health insurance coverage significantly ... -
Effects of Youth Savings Accounts on School Attendance and Academic Performance: Evidence from a Youth Savings Experiment
(Springer, 2018)Asset-accumulation interventions are promising tools for promoting better educational outcomes. However, little is known about the educational effects of youth-owned assets, particularly in resource-limited countries. The ...