Education Marketplace Platform

巴基斯坦面临着严重的学习危机：尽管在入学率和教育机会方面取得了重大进展，但学习结果仍然非常不理想：只有40%的5至16岁农村儿童能够阅读句子，而不到38%的儿童能够进行减法等简单的算术运算（ASER, 2016）。十多年来，巴基斯坦学校的学习和教育成就（LEAPS）项目研究了巴基斯坦的教育状况和不断增长的低成本私立学校（LCPS）部门。在一个超过40%的在校学生就读私立学校的国家，LEAPS项目表明，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）。本项目将以其题为“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”的家长研究为基础，该研究表明，低成本私立学校的创新和改进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，通过市场干预，将低成本学校（特别是偏远农村学校）与提供专门针对其需求的产品的融资提供者和教育支持服务（ESS）提供者联系起来，可以成功克服这些障碍。然而，在母研究中使用的连接机制，使LCPS获得金融和ESS产品是成本和时间密集型的。通过贷款人员访问学校的方式向lps提供贷款，并在为连接学校和经过审查的ESS供应商而组织的教育交易会（melas）上向lps提供ESS产品。为了扩大规模并缓解更多学校的这些限制，需要一种更快、更便宜、更可持续的解决方案来连接学校和供应商。鉴于ESS产品的市场非常“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。通过做市的方法，我们提出了一个数字教育市场的解决方案。我们将建立一个网络平台，让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；这将使供应商能够进入一个尚未开发的市场，即他们尚未进入的感兴趣的学校。我们将首先调查并将2万名lps纳入平台，最终目标是将其扩展到巴基斯坦所有17万多所公立、私立和非营利学校。随着平台上学校数量的增加，我们预计会有更多的供应商受到激励，以创新的解决方案进入这个不断增长的市场，以满足日益增长的需求。竞争将带来质量更好、成本更低的产品。先进的技术将促进市场双方的联系，并产生大量的数据流。我们将测量占用率，并将其与母研究的基准进行比较，以评估数字解决方案的可行性。一旦它在学校取得成功，我们希望扩展这个平台，使个人教师、独立导师、家长和学生都能获得资源。我们特别感兴趣的赋权目标群体包括偏远地区的失学儿童和在家中教育儿童（尤其是女童）的农村女教师。鉴于我们的变革理论，即知识的产生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巨大影响，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.