Education Marketplace Platform

巴基斯坦面临着严重的学习危机：尽管入学率和受教育机会方面取得了重大进展，但学习成果仍然远远低于标准：只有40%的5至16岁的农村儿童能读一个句子，而不到38%的儿童能做减法等简单的算术运算。（ASER，2016年）。十多年来，（巴基斯坦学校的学习和教育成就）项目研究了巴基斯坦的教育格局和不断增长的低成本私立学校（LCPS）部门在一个超过40%的注册学生就读私立学校的国家，LEAPS计划表明，一些市场失灵限制了学校扩大和提供更高质量教育的能力，从教师短缺和信息限制到缺乏财政资源和知识失败（Andrabi et al. 2013，Andrabi et al. 2014）。该项目将以其母公司研究“促进低成本私立学校的创新增长：来自巴基斯坦的实验证据”为基础，该研究表明，低成本私立学校创新和改进的能力受到两个关键制约因素的阻碍：（1）缺乏获得财政资源的途径，（2）缺乏获得负担得起的、提高质量的教育投入的途径，如更好的教科书，教师培训和教学辅助工具。它还表明，这些障碍可以通过市场营销干预措施成功克服，这些干预措施将低成本学校（特别是偏远农村学校）与提供专门针对其需要的产品的金融提供者和教育支助服务提供者联系起来。然而，在母研究中使用的连接机制，使LCPS获得资金和ESS产品的成本和时间密集型。贷款官员通过访问学校向地方社区方案提供贷款，并在为连接学校和经审查的教育服务提供者而举办的教育交易会上向其提供教育服务产品。为了扩大规模并缓解更多学校的这些制约因素，需要一种更快、更便宜和更可持续的解决方案来连接学校和供应商。鉴于ESS产品的市场是如此的“薄”，我们还需要找到一种方法来吸引更多的供应商，以满足不断扩大的学校市场的需求。使用做市的方法，我们提出的解决方案是一个数字教育市场。我们将建立一个网络平台，使学校能够搜索和识别他们需要但目前可能无法获得的产品和服务;并将使供应商能够进入他们尚未进入的感兴趣学校的尚未开发的市场。我们将开始调查并将20，000个LCPS带到平台上，最终目标是扩展到巴基斯坦所有170，000多所公立，私立和非营利性学校。随着平台上学校数量的增加，我们预计更多供应商将受到激励，以创新的解决方案进入这个不断增长的市场，以满足不断增长的需求。竞争将导致更好的质量和更低的成本产品。先进的技术将促进市场双方的联系，并产生大量的数据流。我们将衡量采用率，并将其与母公司研究的基准进行比较，以评估数字解决方案的可行性。一旦它在学校证明是成功的，我们希望扩大这个平台，使教师、独立导师、家长和学生都能获得资源。我们特别希望增强权能的目标群体包括偏远地区的失学儿童和在家中教育儿童，特别是女孩的农村女教师。鉴于我们的变革理论，即知识生成和创新是提高教育质量的关键，这种干预可以产生大规模的影响，促进创新，并为改善巴基斯坦整个教育生态系统的学习成果铺平道路。

Pakistan faces a serious learning crisis: despite significant progress in enrollment and educational access, learning outcomes remain vastly substandard: only 40% of rural children aged 5 to 16 can read a sentence, while less than 38% can perform simple arithmetic operations like subtraction (ASER, 2016).For over a decade the LEAPS (Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools) Program has studied Pakistan's education landscape and growing low cost private school (LCPS) sector. In a country where over 40% of enrolled students attend private school, the LEAPS program has shown that a number of market failures limit the ability of schools to expand and provide higher quality education, ranging from teacher shortages and informational constraints to lack of financial resources and knowledge failures (Andrabi et al. 2013, Andrabi et al. 2014). This project will build on its parent study, "Facilitating Innovative Growth of Low-Cost Private Schools: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan," which demonstrated that the ability of low cost private schools to innovate and improve is hindered by two key constraints: 1) lack of access to financial resources, and 2) lack of access to affordable, quality enhancing educational inputs such as better textbooks, teacher training and teaching and learning aids. It also demonstrated that these obstacles can be successfully overcome by market-making interventions that connect low cost schools (especially remote rural ones) to finance providers and education support service (ESS) providers that offer products specifically tailored to their needs. However, the connecting mechanisms used in the parent study to give LCPS access to finance and ESS products were cost and time intensive. LCPS were offered loans through school visits by loan officers, and were offered ESS products at education trade fairs (melas) that were organized to connect schools and vetted ESS providers. In order to increase scale and alleviate these constraints for a larger number of schools, a quicker, cheaper and more sustainable solution is required to connect schools and providers. Given how 'thin' the market for ESS products is, we also need to find a way to attract more suppliers to meet the needs of an expanding school market. Using a market-making approach, our proposed solution is a digital education marketplace. We will build a web platform that allows schools to search for and identify the products and services they need but may not currently have had access to; and will allow suppliers to reach a currently untapped market of interested schools to which they do not yet have access. We will begin by surveying and bringing 20,000 LCPS onto the platform, with an end goal of expanding to all 170,000+ public, private and nonprofit schools across Pakistan. As the number of schools on the platform increases, we expect that more suppliers will be incentivized to enter this growing market with innovative solutions to cater to increasing demand. Competition will lead to better quality and lower cost products. Sophisticated technology will facilitate connections on both sides of the market and generate large data flows. We will measure take up rates and compare them to benchmarks from the parent study to assess the viability of a digital solution. Once it proves successful for schools, we hope to expand this platform to make resources accessible to individual teachers, independent tutors, parents and students. Target groups that we are especially interested in empowering include out-of-school children in hard-to-reach areas and rural female tutors who teach children, especially girls, from within their homes. Given our theory of change that knowledge generation and innovation are key to improving education quality, such an intervention can have large impact at scale, catalyzing innovation and paving the way for improved learning outcomes across the education ecosystem of Pakistan.