A New Approach to Education in Pakistan: Helping Schools Help Themselves

On this week's Speaker Series podcast, we are joined by Zainab Qureshi, the LEAPS (Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools) Senior Program Manager at the Center for International Development’s EPoD (Evidence for Policy Design). Zainab will be speaking about EPoD’s research on alleviating system-level constraints to improve student learning outcomes in Pakistan. // Originally recorded on December 6, 2019. About the talk: School enrollment is up in Pakistan, but student learning outcomes remain vastly sub-standard. At same time, widespread local entrepreneurship has dramatically changed Pakistan's education landscape, with 42% of school-going children now attending low cost private schools. Transformational research by the LEAPS program shows that improving education quality will require moving beyond the traditional approach of input augmentation towards a new, systems-based approach that explores how to catalyze innovation in the entire education ecosystem and help schools help themselves. This talk will outline the Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) team’s research on how to alleviate system-level constraints to improve student learning outcomes. Lead researchers on LEAPS are Prof. Tahir Andrabi (Pomona), Prof. Jishnu Das (Georgetown) and Prof. Asim Ijaz Khwaja (Harvard Kennedy School). About the Speaker: Zainab Qureshi is the LEAPS Senior Program Manager at EPoD, overseeing implementation of Education and policy research in Pakistan. She has previously worked at various organizations across the Education sector in Pakistan, implementing low cost Education delivery programs and developing an alternate model of education for low income schools. She holds a Master’s in Education (Ed.M.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in Economics and International Development from McGill University.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.