Together with its partners, the World Bank Group office in New York is holding an event on February 13, 2018 to showcase the World Development Report (WDR) 2018, and to engage with UN Member States, UN agencies, Funds and Programs, Civil Society, and other stakeholders in a discussion on how to tackle the global learning crisis, which will be critical for achieving quality education (SDG4) and realizing all the SDGs
Education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to give them strong foundational skills that will allow them to learn throughout their careers and their lives.
The World Bank recently released the World Development Report (WDR) 2018. Each year, the WDR features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 edition, which is the 40th in the series, is the first ever devoted entirely to education.
Despite massive global gains in access to education, recent learning assessments reveal that many children around the world are leaving school unequipped with even foundational literacy and numeracy skills, let alone higher-order 21st-century skills. And it’s not just low-income countries: skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. The report uses new data to diagnose what’s causing this learning crisis and how to tackle it. The solution starts with learning metrics and evidence-based programs to make schools work for learners, but that won’t be enough: countries must also overcome stubborn system-level technical and political barriers to learning. This means deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and taking an adaptive approach to reform.
Deon Filmer
Co-Director of the WDR 2018
Deon Filmer is a Co-Director of the World Development Report 2018. He was previously Lead Economist in the Research Group at the World Bank, and served as Lead Economist in the Human Development department of the Africa Region of the World Bank. He works on issues of human capital and skills, service delivery, and the impact of policies and programs to improve human development outcomes—with research spanning the areas of education, health, social protection, and poverty and inequality. He has published widely in refereed journals, including studies of the impact of demand-side programs on schooling and learning; the roles of poverty, gender, orphanhood, and disability in explaining education inequalities; and the determinants of effective service delivery. He has recently co-authored books on Making Schools Work: New Evidence from Accountability Reforms and Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and was a core team member of the World Bank's World Development Reports in 1995 Workers in an Integrating World and 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People. He holds a PhD and MA from Brown University and a BA from Tufts University.
Halsey Rogers
Co-Director of the WDR 2018
Halsey Rogers is Co-Director of the World Development Report 2018. As Lead Economist with the Education Global Practice, he led the World Bank’s global work on teacher policy, represented the Bank in negotiations on the SDG education agenda, and co-authored the Education Strategy 2020: Learning for All. Rogers has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and advised governments around the world on teacher effectiveness, service delivery, aid and development effectiveness, and other topics such as private tutoring and out-of-school youth. He also co-authored Growth and Empowerment: Making Development Happen (Oxford). Rogers has also served as an advisor to former World Bank chief economists Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern and as Senior Economist in the Research department. Prior to joining the Bank, he served with the Council of Economic Advisors at the White House, UC Berkeley, the Indonesian Ministry of Finance in Jakarta, and the Korea Development Institute in Seoul. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley.
