Education Marketplace Platform

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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.