Health: China’s battle against anemia- REAP's contribution to 3ie's annual report

发布日期：2011/01/11　　来源： ccap

View point by Scott Rozelle and Linxiu Zhang:   Scott Rozelle, REAP co-director and professor at Stanford University, an economist who has studied rural China for 25 years. Linxiu Zhang, REAP Director and professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences  
Four dollars of multivitamins can turn a C student into a B student. The effects we are seeing are much larger than what’s been recorded for many other high-profile education interventions, such as class size reductions and vitamins are cheaper than building more classrooms and training more teachers.

Chinese leaders at provincial and even national level have now taken notice. The governor of Shaanxi Province, in China’s northwest, ordered a new experiment and requested that REAP be on hand to evaluate it. Elite government leaders, including the Premier, Vice Premier and members of the State Council, have ordered the Ministry of Education to take action on the issue and develop plans for improving nutrition and health on rural schools. China’s twelfth Five year plan provides increased funds for childhood nutrition programmes and Provincial authorities in Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Gansu have recently launched major nutritional campaigns.

How is it that REAP was the first to identify anemia as a problem? It was only possible because our research team was willing to leave our offices and work in some of the poorest areas of the world. In the past four years, REAP has spent a lot of time in the backwaters of China’s vast hinterland, mostly in remote mountains and stark deserts, working closely with educators, doctors, parents, students, and others.

REAP’s strategic location in the Chinese Academy of Sciences provides access to the best available expertise in designing promising policy experiments. Through its team, the project has also developed a network of partners, including the School of Education, the Department of Economics, and the Center for Health Policy, as well as other groups from leading universities, research centres, NGOs, and corporations.

Our work does not stop after the numbers are crunched. Through our collaborators in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, we are directly engaging with the office of China’s State Council, China’s highest governing body in the field to disseminate our findings. In the past year, six different policy briefs based on REAP’s research have been read and acted on by the Premier and his staff. We are constantly reminding ourselves that we are committed to informing policy, evaluating policy, and changing policy. So one of our main tasks in designing a study is to make sure it is policy relevant.

The battle against anemia is not the only area in which REAP has made a contribution. A recent REAP study found that China’s rapidly proliferating migrant schools — mostly unregulated institutions that serve the children of China’s millions of rural-to-urban migrants —encompass the lowest performing group of students in the entire country. REAP has also discovered that scholarships in China are allocated in a way that induces children to select lower ranking schools and undesirable majors. Another study revealed that more than two-thirds of China’s rural pre-school children do not have the basic competencies necessary to compete in the nation’s challenging elementary school curriculum.


Download full text  projects in focus- REAP_2011.doc