Held Back: Explaining the Sluggish Pace of Improvement to Basic Education in Developing Democracies–The Cases of India and Brazil

Despite the widely accepted relationship between quality primary education and sustainable, equitable development, two of the world’s fastest-growing democracies—India and Brazil— continue to trail their regional and economic peers in basic learning outcomes. Using a supply and demand framework, this article identifies six institutional factors that we hypothesize may have been determinative in shaping education outcomes in both countries: actual popular demand, availability of information about public education quality, impact of private school alternatives, financial allocations, incentive structures for educational personnel, and the influence of political institutions on the responsiveness of public leaders. Our analysis reveals the interrelationships among these six factors and their connections to broader economic, political, social, and historical realities in each country. We conclude by identifying central elements of public accountability mechanisms that seem to be the most appropriate institutional venues to create and maintain the type of sustained, focused public pressure necessary to achieve lasting improvements to access and quality.

Accepted: 2023-08-04T18:58:08Z Publisher: Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development