Better Secondary Schooling Outcomes for Adolescents in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Projections of Cost-Effective Approaches.

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to identify effective interventions to reduce secondary school dropout rates, increase the quality of learning in secondary schools in developing countries, and estimate the cost and educational impact of a sustained program to implement a selection of these interventions.

Methods: Dropout risk is analyzed by multivariable regression using micro-datasets for 44 developing countries for which Demographic and Health Surveys are available. The analysis of interventions accesses recent meta-analyses of educational interventions in developing countries.

Building the foundations for sustainable development: a case for global investment in the capabilities of adolescents.

Investment in the capabilities of the world's 1·2 billion adolescents is vital to the UN's Sustainable Development Agenda. We examined investments in countries of low income, lower-middle income, and upper-middle income covering the majority of these adolescents globally to derive estimates of investment returns given existing knowledge. The costs and effects of the interventions were estimated by adapting existing models and by extending methods to create new modelling tools.