 First of all, let me just apologize. I've got a bit of a cold, so my voice isn't as quite as robust as it normally is. So today, I'm going to talk to you, not specifically about technological upgrading, but more about the foundations, perhaps, of what that might be, which is education and education at the primary level. And I'm going to discuss a little bit about some of the evidence we have on this from East Africa. I'm going to start by motivating you with respect to why should we care about primary education. And I think there's three reasons typically that we're interested in education. The first one has been from maybe a philosophical perspective and from a nation-building perspective is creating citizens. So education creates citizens and people engaged in the States and in some national project. The second one has often been discussed in terms of reducing inequalities, therefore, in some respect, level the playing field that might exist. And the third one has often been what economists have mostly focused on, which is something about growth and income. Indeed, the first schools that were the first public schools that were created in many developed countries were precisely to create a body of workers to go into the factories. So this is the kind of standard kind of relationship that we tend to see in the data. So conditional on initial income, we find a positive relationship between growth and years of education. So this is a very standard thing. So that's one of the reasons why we're interested in education, but I'll come back to really what that means in a little bit. The other point which relates to really the other part about level the playing field is that in Africa, we should remember that the role of the state in education has been rather tumultuous. So during the colonial period, public education was not a priority. If it existed, the aims were extremely limited. And some scholars have described this form of education as a kind of a racist anthropology designed to create cheap labor for what remained a colonial organized economy. So it's been quite important in terms of the history. And we should think, for example, of some examples like Zambia, so on independence, there were just 109 graduates, so university graduates, and only half a percent of the workforce had completed primary education. So the base from which many African countries are coming from in terms of education has historically been extremely low. And for this reason, the expansion of education has been one of the most tangible gains for the population of independence. And all of the post-independence governments in the 50s and the 60s through to the 70s at least made a big emphasis on expanding free primary education through a range of initiatives, including abolition of racial segregation, where that was existing, creating full primary school cycles in urban and rural areas, removing school fees, creating scholarship programs for disadvantaged children, and so on and so forth. That was pretty successful, actually, in the 60s and 70s, but as some of you will know, there were some lost decades, both economically and with respect to education in the 80s and 90s. But even so, we have seen a good accumulation, at least in terms of access. So if we look just at mean years of schooling, which is one indication of access to education, we find that in 1975, this was historically very low. And a good comparison point here is France. France, in 1975, the mean years of schooling of the population aged 15 plus, was just around six. So in 1975, no African country had mean years of schooling of that level, but actually, if we look at 2010, which is on the vertical axis, we find that there are many countries now that have more than six years of schooling, on average, Botswana being up there as one of the biggest success stories in terms of expansion of education. Of course, there is a lot of variants, so there's a number of countries where it's pretty low still. Some of them are post-conflict countries now, such as Rwanda and so forth. But overall, there have been large gains. So what are the debates now with respect to education in Africa? Well, perhaps the key point, if you take one thing away from this presentation, perhaps it's this, access to schooling is not learning. So just because people are going to school doesn't mean they learn anything. So if we take the relationship that I showed you before between years of education and growth, and if we just control for test scores, let's say at grade six, that relationship goes away. So the relationship between education and growth is not driven by accumulation of years of schooling. It's driven by what you learn in school. So your test scores. So this is critical at the macro level. That's our understanding. So the quality of education is important, not necessarily how many years you've been in school. So in fact, this is really where the debate is, both internationally and with respect to Africa. And with respect to Africa, we've seen huge expansion of enrollments over the last 10 years. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, which I will discuss in a minute, have all abolished fees for primary education since around the early 2000s, and that has led to very large enrollment rates. But the problem has been perhaps, maybe this has led to a declining quality. And in fact, our competitor here, one of our Lant Pritchett in a paper says, for example, that until school systems can guarantee that students will learn while sitting in class, it may even be counterproductive to encourage longer periods of universal education. Expanded enrollments can actually harm overall learning outcomes if quality cannot be broadly maintained. So that's a very important challenge, I think. And if, just to give you a visual example of the kinds of challenges that some schools are facing, this is not necessarily a typical, but it is certainly a primary school in Kenya. Many children sitting on the floor, loaded to capacity, a large variety in terms of the ages of children at any given level, extremely challenging conditions. So maybe from an academic and from a policy perspective, if we're interested in learning outcomes, well, what do we know about it? Very little. The data we have has been extremely limited to date. There are a couple of initiatives that have been out there. Some of you will have heard of something like the TIMS or the PISA or the SACMEC or the PASSEC. These are just acronyms for different survey kinds of instruments. But typically, these have covered only a few countries. They're relatively infrequent, so they're not on an annual basis, so they're not really good for monitoring. And perhaps more critical is that they focus on children at upper levels of primary school. So in grade six, the SACMEC and the PASSEC, which are probably the largest coverage in terms of countries, they focus on children at grade six. But children on grade six are a very small sample of the entire population of primary school children. And in fact, many children drop out before reaching that. So in terms of levels of education at a more representative level, it's weak. And also the sample sizes are quite small. So from the perspective of understanding within country variation, regional issues in education, they're unfortunately not really very suitable. And even from the point of view of what governments themselves are doing, less than half of all Sub-Saharan African countries have conducted any of their own national learning assessments since 1995. So governments themselves aren't doing this either. I think it should be, it's an interesting point of reflection, particularly for academics, is that despite this lack of knowledge, what have academics been doing? Well, we've been thinking about RCTs, randomized controlled trials. Many of them have come out of Kenya. So those of you who are familiar with the literature, but I think it is a bit of an odd situation when in fact our understanding of the nature of the challenges is actually so weak. So we're trying to find solutions in a sense without really knowing what the baseline is, at least at a national level. When I think that that is a challenge for economists to be policy relevant, we should be asking the right questions. So now I'm gonna, hopefully I've motivated you. So there is a knowledge gap and this is an important issue. So now I'm gonna talk to you a bit about some work I've been doing on East Africa. And I'm gonna focus on two questions. Is there a learning crisis in East Africa? So with respect to the context of large increases in enrollments and anecdotally many people have said, well, no, our children aren't learning anything. Is there a learning crisis? And secondly, if so, where are the weaknesses in the system? And the data I'm gonna use for this are large scale household surveys undertaken in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda since 2010, which are representative at the district level. So not just nationally within individual districts. It's collected independently by a non-governmental organization following a model developed in India by Pratham and they call it the ASEM model or the annual survey. I can't actually remember what that stands for, but yeah, sorry, I won't mislead you by giving it the wrong acronym. And what they look at is that they undertake, they administer tests at the household level to all children of school age within a given household and their focus on have these children acquired competencies that are expected after two years of schooling. So do they have some just very basic competencies, regardless of where they are, whether they're in school or out of school, can they do things that you would expect that they should do having completed two years of education? That's not that relevant, I'm gonna... So for example, one of the tests would be a very simple reading test like this. And if you can read the test, then you would be asked a question if did you actually understand it? So for example, what do the pupils write in? Who gives his pupils books? These are the kinds of tests that are administered. So they're fairly basic, but they're important. They're just really identifying do people have minimal literacy skills and the same is for numeracy as well. So it's a literacy and numeracy test. What are the results? Well, if we just look at the lowest level of competency available on literacy, it's quite staggering really. So for example, and this is by age here. So at age 10, more than half of the children in East Africa either are unable to recognize a word or unable to recognize two digit numbers or both. So this is combining both the literacy and numeracy and in kind of an aggregate score. So at age 10, there's some serious, 50% isn't, that's 50% can, but 50% can't. And even by age 13, 14, there's still a minority who are unable to fulfill these, even these very basic competencies. There's more detail on all of these tests in a paper I'll give you the link to later, but this is just giving you the headline. So the point is, is yes, there is a learning crisis. So the question becomes why? And actually there's three possible reasons why. The first one is that maybe people, children are still not enrolling or attending school. Of course, on the assumption that children, a precondition for learning is that they go to school, one of the primary reasons could be that they're not actually going to school. A second reason could be that they're not progressing through to higher grades. So many children go to school, but don't progress. A third reason could be even if they enroll and go through to higher grades, they're not actually acquiring any new skills at each grade. So they're sitting in class, if that, but not learning anything. We can call this a bit of a schooling chain, if you wish. We're gonna look at each element in turn just to give you a sense of what we know. So enrollment. So actually enrollment in general is broadly quite high. So what we find is that more than 90% of all children in East Africa attend school for more than five years, basically. There are problems, as you can see on the left-hand side, this is by age, so on the left-hand side, is it left? Oh no, sorry, right-hand side for you. At age six, for example, which is the starting age of education in Kenya, less than 70% of Kenyan children of age six are attending school. So there are issues in terms of getting children in to school and starting at the correct age. And also there's dropout rates and so on and so forth. But overall, it's not the key to the problem. And we can also say that from the point of gender equality, that is broadly positive. So we don't see the same kinds of issues with respect to discrimination that we do see in some other regions. So we don't see that in East Africa. So at the same time, it should be pointed out that there are some problem districts. So if we look at the district level and look at children aged 13 that aren't enrolled in any form of schooling, we find that there are problem districts in, particularly in both Kenya and Uganda. And these are relatively well-known issues, but they remain important. So that there are certain areas where well over one in four of all children aged 13 are not in school in certain areas. In terms of progression, there's a number of ways to measure that. And there's two indicators that we use here. One of them is the grade cost ratio, which just gives you the average number of years of schooling required to progress a grade, in a sense. Or basically, it's the number of additional years of schooling, sorry, which is better here. A number of additional years of schooling, more than one, required to progress a grade. For example, if you need to spend two years in school to progress one grade, that's a grade cost ratio of more than zero. And we can also look at how many or what percentage of children are overage for grade. And if we look at this, we see some more interesting issues. So in all the countries, the grade cost ratio is above zero, so it's not perfect. And we see, particularly in Uganda, a major concern. It requires at least half a year of additional schooling at the median to progress a single grade in Uganda. And this accumulates over time. So what this means is that to achieve seven years of primary education, it really takes a lot more than seven years on average. So children are churning around in the system for a long time, and particularly in Uganda. And we have the same issue in terms of the overage for grade. So large numbers of children are overage for grade. And if the blue dots on the right, on the left-hand panel are the ones for Uganda. As you can see that in most districts, more than 50% of children are overage for grade. So you get what I mean, overage for grade. So looking at the last element of the chain, so it's conditional now on the grade. So on the x-axis, we have what grade they're at. Are children learning anything? And here we see there is progression, but it's very slow. So this is again at a very basic level of the tests, do children recognize words? It's interesting, for example, that in Uganda, even at grade four, less than 50% of Ugandan children can recognize a word. In Kenya, which is the green line, it's substantially higher, but it's by no means perfect. Now, if we look at the full range of the tests and the percentage of children that can meet these grade two competencies, we find that it takes at least until grade five in Kenya for more than 50% of the children to achieve a pass on a grade two competency. So it takes three extra grades to achieve the level that would be required at grade two. In Tanzania and Uganda, it takes substantially longer. So the point is, is that many children are leaving primary education without having learnt minimum or basic skills in literacy and numeracy. Before I wrap up, I just want to ask the question, is East Africa exceptional? Is this, clearly my time is up? No, so what we know, and of course, that the tests aren't exactly the same, but based on the same philosophy of testing and basically the same kinds of competencies, tests undertaken in India and Pakistan, we find that there's actually similar issues. Let's just take, for example, subtraction. So can children undertake basic two digit subtraction? If we see that in, for example, in grade five in rural Pakistan, 73% of children can, but in grade five in rural India, 52% can, but in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, we have 90, 80 and 80%. So the point is, is that this East Africa is not exceptional. There are serious challenges across the developing world in terms of the quality of education. So just to wrap up, are children going to school in East Africa? Well, yes, mostly. Are children progressing through school slowly? And are children learning in class? Not so much. So the challenge is really about the quality of learning when they're in school. Policy implications, they're not straightforward. And I don't think we can leap very quickly to policy implications from this, but we should recognize good progress on enrollment. And in fact, it's the cup half empty is the cup half full. In fact, if we believe that to make progress on learning, we've got to get children into school first. Well, that's good. That's been a huge progress. So the challenge now is to shift the focus to quality of education. And I think we should also reflect on whether the schools themselves are really, the issues. There's a lot of literature that suggests that interventions in the preschool phase can be far more productive. And actually evidence suggests, even from this data, that it's when children come into school with a minimum of basic competencies and having had some experience of preschooling, their ability to pick up and learn is much higher than if they're coming in without any prior experience to any form of format of education. And we should also be aware of the difference between marginal reforms such as more school inputs versus more fundamental structural changes around incentives. But we can discuss that later. Thank you very much. And here's a link to a paper which talks about these in more detail is available online. Thank you.