A range of studies have examined alternative ways to reform health and education systems and address what is perhaps the most important failure in these systems. No simple answer emerges but some general lessons do stand out.

Remedial tutoring is inexpensive and successful in helping the lowest-achieving students of rural India catch up to their classmates.

Local leaders in India invest more in public goods directly relevant to the needs of their own gender.

On an average day in rural Udaipur, India, 44% of teachers are absent from school. While Udaipur’s problem was especially severe, teacher absence is all too typical of schools in poor countries. This briefcase summarizes the implications from the evaluation of one highly successful program to reduce...

The international community has promised to achieve universal primary education and to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015. In this bulletin, we assess the most effective ways of increasing child attendance at school.

Introducing fingerprinting identification for microloans caused high-risk borrowers to take out smaller loans and to improve their repayment behavior.

Girls in Nepal missed only half a day of school per year due to menstruation, and modern sanitary products did little to address this very small attendance gap.

Even very small incentives can encourage people to return for their HIV test results. However, for most people, learning status did not substantially change the number of condoms they purchased.

The problem is that the children are in school, but they are not learning.

Enabling farmers to prepay for fertilizer when they had cash on hand was effective in promoting fertilizer adoption.

Small incentives for parents, coupled with reliable services at convenient mobile clinics, increased full immunization rates sixfold. This approach was twice as cost-effective as improving service reliability without incentives.

Recent evidence from randomized studies of microfinance indicate that poor people face various limits in their ability to capitalize on financial opportunities. Product design matters, and inexpensive design tweaks may help the poor to benefit more from financial products and services.

A retail-sector subsidy for effective antimalarials in Kenya greatly increased access among the most vulnerable, but design matters: finding the right price and providing diagnostic tests are important tools for limiting unnecessary treatment.

A quota system for female village leaders in India changed perceptions of women’s abilities, improved women’s electoral chances, and raised aspirations and educational attainment for adolescent girls.