Development Research Group

School principals spend about 76% of their time on administrative work instead of on teaching and learning.

El Director Libre (The Liberated Principal) introduces a practical method that uses artificial intelligence ethically and responsibly to help school leaders reduce paperwork and improve instructional leadership. This is a joint collaboration between LAC EDU (Ezequiel Molina) and DECRG (Carolina Lopez) that combines the World Bank's experience in educational transformation and rigorous research.

Replay the launch event of October 30th to learn more about the report.

Development succeeds when people are not just beneficiaries, but partners in shaping change. Yet too often, policies are designed and evaluated from the top down — guided by data and models that miss how people actually live, adapt, and respond.

In this talk, World Bank Lead Economist Vijayendra Rao will share insights from two decades of research on participatory and adaptive approaches to policymaking.

Drawing on examples from India, Malaysia, and South Asia, he explores how engaging citizens can make institutions more accountable, programs more effective, and development more inclusive.

For the world’s poorest people, climate change does not announce itself in parts per million. It arrives as a ruined harvest, a flooded shopfront, and lost learning as children are kept out of school.

This new Policy Research Report argues that the most consequential climate-policy question for developing economies is how quickly people, firms, and governments can prepare for shocks, recover from them, and learn to do better next time. To ensure that a bad day, week, or season does not become a bad decade, the principal response to climate change for developing economies should be to quickly become more resilient to it.

For the 15th year, the Development Impact blog invites PhD candidates to share their job market paper through a blog post on empirical development, impact evaluation, or measurement.

Submissions are open until 8pm EST on Wednesday, November 5, with posts published starting November 10. Selected entries will appear as guest posts on Development Impact, offering a platform to showcase your work to a wide audience of researchers and practitioners.