World Bank: Education Is the Key to Reducing Poverty  Khmer Times, Interview with Ulrich Zachau, country director at the World Bank: Cambodia has continued to change. GDP has been growing impressively at an average of 7.6 percent and the poverty rate fell from 47.8 percent in 2007 to 13.5 percent in 2014. Cambodia has come a long way and is a leader in East Asia in reducing poverty. This progress is visible both in Phnom Penh and elsewhere in the country where people are better off than they used to be…

Editorial: Encouraging children to read  Sun Star – The World Bank has a disconcerting figure to share: more than 250-million schoolchildren throughout the world cannot read. We can attest to that as we have encountered high school students who find it hard to read much more comprehend. Being handicapped in both, it follows that they can hardly express their thoughts in printed word. This is a warning in the horizon that we can address now or suffer in the future. After all, literacy is a basic skill that is required so a person can acquire advanced skills that bring higher wages and earning capacities and employment opportunities. The World Bank then challenges countries to invest in interventions to get the young to read. In the World Bank log by Harry Patrinos, Jimmy Graham, and Sean Kelly, it reads: “In order to address the high rates of child illiteracy that pervade in developing countries, we believe that education funding should be shifted towards early primary education reading initiatives…

Public-Private Partnerships in Education in Developing Countries: A Rigorous Review of the Evidence  …governments around the world are making the economic and political decision to engage the non-state sector to deliver education that may have previously been delivered by the public sector. They do this because they believe the resultant public-private partnerships (PPPs) bring about efficiencies that improve not only the quantity but also potentially the quality of education for all children across all sectors by maximizing the advantages offered by each sector. Governments entering into such arrangements are typically driven by one or more of the following goals: increasing access, improving quality and delivering education in the most cost effective manner…

The case for increasing investment in the early years – in the Indonesia Economic Quarterly June 2017 http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/519051497412363381/IEQ-June-2017-ENG.pdf

Assessing Basic Education Service Delivery in the Philippines: Public Education Expenditure Tracking and Quantitative Service Delivery Study http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/philippines/publication/assessing-basic-education-service-delivery-in-the-philippines-public-education-expenditure-tracking-and-quantitative-service-delivery-study?cid=EAP_TwitterWorldBankAsia_P_EXT?cid=EXT_WBEmailShare_EXT

The Real Cost Of Asia’s Billion Dollar Shadow Education Industry For Students

3.8M out-of-school children & youth in the Philippines http://www.sunstar.com.ph/manila/local-news/2017/06/14/38m-out-school-children-youth-ph-survey-547399