Africa’s largest economy has found itself in an increasingly vulnerable financial position due to several shocks in the past decade. It relied on private creditors to compensate for revenue shortfalls in 2016 and 2017 after the collapse of commodity prices. The COVID-19 pandemic induced more borrowing, this time from multilateral sources. These events have led to the highest external debt levels in Nigeria since 2004.

Increased debt levels clogged financing for key SDG outcomes relating to social welfare sectors more broadly and gender equality and the environment in particular. This paper explored the need for, viability of, and impacts of debt swaps in Nigeria. It focused on two sources of debt that are mostly likely to be involved in a debt swap: Paris Club ODA debt and underperforming private sector debt. These two sources together comprise a sum of more than $3.7 billion whose exchange could free up resources to fund development priorities for facilitators of the debt swap. If the entirety of the eligible debt were to be swapped, it would create an average of nearly $300 million of budgetary resources (per year) for the next six years. Beyond funding development projects, remaining funds could decrease the debt burden, provided they do not beget additional borrowing. The paper also traced the experiences of five countries participating in debt-for-nature swaps.

This Paper was first published by RED SUR as part of the Working Paper of the Project “Promoting a pandemic recovery: evidence to support managing the growing debt crisis” (IDRC - Red Sur N° 109742-001)

Systematic, quantitative evidence on education system coherence is limited. Prior research has indicated alignment of instructional components, such as curriculum standards, assessments, and teachers’ instruction, is important for children’s learning. This study uses the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum methodology to investigate alignment of instructional components in Nigeria's primary education system. The study analyzes curriculum standards, national exams, and classroom instructional content for mathematics and English language across all six primary-level grades. We find that key foundational mathematics and English language skills are covered by all three components, with some notable omissions on the end-of-cycle English language exams. All three components give high emphasis to the low cognitive demand processes of ‘memorize’ ‘perform’, and ‘demonstrate’, and give very low emphasis to the more demanding cognitive processes of ‘analyze’ and ‘apply to non-routine situations’. Both the curriculum standards and classroom instruction depict a slow pace of content progression across grades, manifested through broad but shallow content coverage. The high alignment suggests the potential for a well-functioning education system, however, low student performance in mathematics and English language exams suggest otherwise. The findings suggest the Nigerian primary education system may be operating in a low-achieving equilibrium in which the system is aligned for low levels of cognitive demand and student mastery.

This Working paper was first published here .

Authors: Adedeji Adeniran, Sixtus Onyekwere, Anthony Okon, Julius Atuhurra, Rastee Chaudhry and Michelle Kaffenberger

Economic development is linked with increased state capacity including the ability to mobilise domestic tax resources. For many developing countries, high levels of informality are a major constraint in this regard. Yet, economic incentives like changing the tax rate or increasing the filling and audit rate can be ineffective in a highly informal economic structure.

In this paper, we explore possible roles for behavioural interventions such as sharing information about peers’ tax behaviour to engineer higher tax compliance. Based on an artefactual field experiment among own account workers in Nigeria, we find that information interventions can play an important role in ensuring tax compliance.

Specifically, targeting information around what people can directly observe can be a way to improve tax compliance. Providing information on punishment or good practices that appeal to feelings of morality yields higher tax compliance.

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The COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019 in the Wuhan city of China and has continued to spread globally. As of this writing, 28.2 million cases have been recorded globally with 910,000 deaths. Aside the health impact, the pandemic has led to an unprecedented disruption in economic activities, initiating a sudden demand, supply, and financial shock. The mitigation strategies put in place by governments across the world to curb the virus as well as the uncertainty associated with the pandemic has led to a reduction in the consumption of non-essential commodities. Meanwhile, disruptions to global supply chains in a closely connected world as well as the reduced demand have necessitated a slowdown in production. Furthermore, investors have become more risk averse with the prices of risk assets falling to levels experienced in the 2007-20008 global financial crisis.   To counteract the fall in private sector demand, stabilize the financial system, and ensure economic recovery, governments and central banks across the world have deployed a range of policies and programmes. Central banks are cutting policy rates and providing direct liquidity to the financial system. Federal and sub-national governments are providing tax relief, cash transfers, and employee retention schemes to alleviate the burden on affected individuals and businesses. Africa is not left behind as governments have increased spending plans (about 1.9% of their GDP) and central banks are adopting more accommodating monetary policies.

The massive expansion of education access throughout the world in the past few decades signalled a positive progress for global development through human capital accumulation. However, this same growth highlighted the substantial deficiency in the learning that schools are unable to deliver to the children that pass through them. In short, massive expansion in schooling has not delivered quality education, a situation that United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2013) termed a global “learning crisis”. The disconnect between schooling and learning in the 21^st Century also informed the global aspiration to improve learning outcomes, as captured in SDG 4.

With the global attention now centered on SDG implementation, policymakers and researchers are focused on data for measuring learning outcomes. Measuring performance against SDG 4 entails assessing the extent to which targets set on inclusive and quality of education have been met. However, as the 2017 Goalkeepers Report shows, there is notable conceptual problem and data gap in measuring the quality of education (see also Unterhalter, 2019).

On the conceptual level, there is lack of consensus on the appropriate indicator of quality education. Education quality is a multidimensional concept and encompasses educational inputs, processes and learning outcomes. This concern is apparent even in the SDG system, particularly, in the Tier Classification of Global SDG indicators developed by the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs). This means that additional work is needed to establish methodology and create an internationally comparable statistic (UN Statistical Commission, 2018).