Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

Reflection on attending UBSLC

This year's topic in the Undergraduate Business Schools Leadership Conference (

UBSLC) is global partnerships. Through this great conference, I built great friendships with top

students from all over the US universities. Also, I have experienced being proactive

representative of my college in this forum. We used Delta airline as an example of global

partnership talking about the benefits this generate to the company. Delta is partnered with many

international airline companies such as KLM, Korean Air, Virgin atlantic and much more.

During the presentation with Steve Sear, President – International and Executive Vice President

– Global Sales for Delta Air Lines, I asked him about the criteria they have to choose

their partners. He replied saying that choosing an airline partner is similar to choosing a wife. It

is a difficult process because whatever they choose stick with them for a long time affecting their

marketing and economical reputation. Delta has high controlled method of choosing their parents

but it has some detailed technical aspects that he though the time we were given would not be

enough to discuss. My friend Saed Almeri asked a question about why don't Delta partner with

Emirates or Etihad. This question brought us to different discussion that I found useful when

interning with UAE embassy. Steve Sear claims that Emirates and Etihad airlines and others as

well receive subsidies from their governments, leading to un fair competition. He mentioned that

they would be happy to partner with them if he feels there is an equal opportunity for both

sides. Steve Sear is against government intervention that makes the partnership is hard thing to

happen.

One of the workshops we attended had a great message that I added to my professional

skills notebook. The message is conflicts can create healthy effective

  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

productive collaboration among teams. Many times people think of conflicts as things to avoid to

ensure harmony in teams. In fact, this is shown to be false in this workshop. We were introduced

to the power of conflicts by watching the TED talk " dare to disagree". We had activities where

we were forced to be in a side of a problem and defend it even if we disagree with it. The

presenter wanted us to disagree with ourselves and think critically. I mentioned at the workshop

my experience of disagreeing with myself especially when I write stories. I always have two

mindsets that I create. One is a creative side and the other is the challenging side that always

disagree and try to find mistakes and prove that I am wrong.

During this year's UBSLC, we were students from 23 schools. We heard from Goizueta's

Wesley Longhofer on poverty and inequality. I participated by mentioning that one of the ways

to reduce poverty is the big push method that were used to help Europe. At that time US donated

big amount of money but later on it benefited from that by trading with Europe. We always

should remind the donors that they also would benefit economically when helping poor

countries. I mentioned that rich countries should feel responsible for people even beyond

their boundaries. If humanity is not the first factor that would drive them to help poor nations,

they should remember that problems poor countries face can affect them potentially. Pollution,

global warming and many other problems will not stay around the borders because we share one

earth where we all should feel responsible of helping each other.

Attending this conference, inspired me to research inequality in education and how would

we solve this problem in poor countries. After reading and research, I came up with a policy
  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

brief that was discussed with Professor McCarthy, teaching Economic Development. She

commented on the chart I created and liked how I structured my solution and simplified it.

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Demand Wallah: Covering Direct and Indirect Costs

Introduction:

“Not everyone has equal abilities, but everyone should have equal opportunity for

education” ( John F Kennedy, n.d.). Education has positive correlation and impact on health,

wealth and many other important aspects of life. Moreover, education is one of the most

important keys that help escaping the poverty trap. I think that it is our responsibility to help poor

kids pursuing their education. The problem of education has two sides; demand and supply

wallahs. I am focusing on demand wallah because ,after reading about the topic, I discovered that

many families might demand education but some direct or indirect costs might prevent them

from doing so. It is important to help them especially that there are low cost policies that have

essential positive impact on increasing demand for education, by covering these costs. The main

directs costs I am discussing are textbooks, and uniforms. The indirect costs are opportunity

costs and low hanging fruits. My policy brief suggests a more organized way to choose the

targeted receptors of our aid than lottery and other random methods.

Literature Review:

Covering Direct Costs

One of the main ways that charities and Non Governmental Organizations,NGOs, help

poor families to increase their demand for education is covering direct costs. These direct costs

such as textbooks, uniforms, and other school materials are a burden to so many poor families,

decreasing their demand for education (Evans, Kremer, & Ngatia, 2009). A study was conducted
  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

in Kenya to test the benefits of textbooks distribution in education. It would be expected that free

textbooks would increase students’ demand for education and help them to improve their

performance (Glewwe, Kremer, & Moulin, 2007). Nevertheless, the study disproves this

showing that there is no difference in the average test scores of students who received textbooks

and those who did not, except for those students who were doing well even before having

textbooks (Glewwe, Kremer, & Moulin, 2007). It is most likely that these textbooks didn’t

positively impact children's performance because they were in English. Although Kenya’s

language of education is English, most children, according to the same source, speak English

poorly since it is only their third language. The mismatch between textbooks and students need

was the reason behind this intervention to fail. According to Banerjee & Duflo, the same study

has been repeated in many other places with other inputs but failed as well (2011).

Although the case of covering direct costs of textbooks didn’t have satisfying results,

distributing free uniforms had more promising findings. Evans, Kremer, & Ngatia ( 2009),

conducted a study based in Kenya that highlights the impact of reducing a primary cost of

schooling, uniforms. A uniform, in Kenya, is the most expensive monetary expenditure for

primary school with the abolition of general school fees, according to the same source. The paper

shows an education intervention in Kenya where NGO gave free school uniforms, absenteeism

was reduced by 44% for the average student. Moreover, the reduction of absenteeism reached

62% for students who did not previously own a uniform, according to the same source.

Increasing children demand for education was not the only impact of free uniforms, but also

enhancing their performance. The program also increased exam scores for students who got free

uniforms by 0.25 standard deviations in the year after inception (Evans, Kremer, & Ngatia,

2009).
  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

Covering Indirect Costs

Direct costs are clear and rational costs but alone they would not cover all cases. In fact

many children are not able to go to schools due to indirect costs such as high opportunity costs.

One of the main policies that came in response to that is CCTs, conditional cash transactions.

The idea is basically offering money to poor families with the condition of sending their children

regularly to schools and that they seek preventive health care (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011). These

CCTs proved to have schooling, economical and health externalities. One of the schooling

results that PROGRESA, a mexican CCT, was raising secondary school enrollment from 67 % to

75 % for girls, and from 73 % to 77 % for boys ( Paul Schultz, 2004). Gignoux (2009) finds that

schooling externality occurs even across relatives, friends and neighbouring villages that don’t

receive CCT. The program incentivizes other families to send their kids to schools hoping that

they receive the cash grant when the program reaches their village. Economically, Handa et al.

(2000) found a 5–12 % point decrease in inequality caused by PROGRESA. Bobonis, G. and

Finan, F. (2009) find a decrease on the average number of days of reported illness among poorer

ineligible children.

Illness increases student’s absenteeism and directly harm their demand for education.

Being not healthy could keep these students in the trap of sickness leading them to stop studying.

To tackle some of the main health issues that students face in poor countries, the concept of

“low- hanging fruit” should be introduced. Low hanging fruits are the cheap technologies that

have huge impact in protecting people’s health (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011). Examples of that are

vaccines, bed nets, sanitizing water, deworming and much more. Since there are many low

hanging fruits, I will focus only on deworming and its impact on fixing demand wallah for

education. Miguel & Kremer (2004) highlight the impact of a school-based deworming program
  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

in Kenya. The program increased in primary school participation in treatment schools by 7.5 %

point average. Also, it reduced overall school absenteeism by more than 25%. In addition,

treatment created positive health and school participation externalities for untreated students.

According to the same paper, the spillovers themselves are enough to justify not only fully

subsidizing deworming treatment, but also paying people to incentivize them to get the

treatment.

Policy Brief:

My main goal is to increase demand for education. Policies that I would like to be applied

are covering the direct and indirect costs that prevent some families from sending their kids to

schools. This would help fixing the demand wallah. I am proposing main three policies; giving

away free uniforms, conditional cash programs, and low hanging fruits. However, these should

not be given randomly as many studies show using lottery for example. Especially if we want to

ensure that these policies have externalities on increasing education demand, we need to follow

another method such as the one I am proposing. A question of whether deworming a kid would

help improving the demand for education or not is important especially if our project focuses on

impacts on increasing demand for education. It is clear that deworming generally have positive

impact on health but since our focus is on education, we need to implement a more specific

policy method that serves our goal.

The project I am proposing is a short term project that should be applied within a year

with low costs but high expected returns. To insure that our project efforts are dedicated to

education, we need to create criterias that meet people who are in need of our program the most.

In addition, we need to limit our focus on a group that we think would make the most of our help

in term of increasing education demand. I designed the chart in figure 1 to help small charities
  
 
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Policy  Briefs  

finding their targeted group. Limitations are created to make the most efficient allocation of the

limited charities’ budget and sources. Otherwise, we would like to offer our donations to

everyone even if they are out of our scope of focus.

This kind of narrowed focus strategy is called the market niche, defined as “the product

features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality

and the demographics that is intended to impact” ( Wikipedia, n.d.). Research results suggest that

niche marketing is an effective strategy because it is specific and specialized thorough

understanding the targeted consumers (Parrish, Cassill, & Oxenham, 2006). This strategy can be

adapted by charities to ensure better outcomes in their focused area of speciality.

I am targeting NGOs and small charities that can invest more time than money in

identifying their targeted receptors and their needs. More time is needed to evaluate each

individual family case by case. First, we need to identify who can benefit from our project. To

generalize a rule, I suggest sending a team from the charity to families that have kids who are not

enrolled in schools. This survey should conduct main problems that poor families face as

obstacles that prevent them from sending their kids to schools. After having a data for each

family and its problems, we need to evaluate whether these problems can be solved by bottom up

strategies. If not this would be out of my project scale. For instance, a problem of a family that

can’t send their girls to school in Afghanistan due to some political or religious issues that

prohibit girls from pursuing their education is hard to be solved by small charities or NGOs.

Thus, we need to move to the second question, whether these problems are supply or demand

wallahs. If they are supply wallahs then they are out of our scope of focus but it they are demand

wallahs then we move to the next question. This question should not be asked directly but

through smarter method in which the team should know how much this family demand
  
 
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Policy  Briefs  

education. This would help us later when prioritizing our options. The last questions are aimed to

understand the nature of the problem. If it is financially, then is it due to high opportunity cost,

where a teenager works and supports his/her family. If that was the case, this family would be

eligible for CCT. If it was a financial problem caused by direct schooling costs, then the family

is eligible for covering the direct costs such as uniforms. If the problem the family faces is health

then they are eligible of receiving free low hanging fruits. Although there are many challenges to

this idea such as time, transparency, and supply wallahs, it could minimize the effect of having

random selection of aid receptors.

Figure 1

References

Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics. New York: Public Affairs Press.

Bobonis, G. J., & Finan, F. (2009). Neighborhood Peer Effects in Secondary School Enrollment

Decisions. Review of Economics and Statistics, 91(4), 695-716. doi:10.1162/rest.91.4.695

  
 
Hamdan  Alameri  
Policy  Briefs  

Evans, D., Kremer, M., & Ngatia, M. (2009). The Impact of Distributing School Uniforms on

Children’s Education in Kenya. doi:10.1596/26453

Gignoux, J. (2009). ‘Spillover of Conditional Cash Transfer across Localities. Evidence from

Progresa’, Working Paper. Paris, Laboratoire d’Economie Appliquee, INRA.

Glewwe, P., Kremer, M., & Moulin, S. (2007). Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test

Scores in Kenya. doi:10.3386/w13300

Handa, S. et al. (2000). Poverty, Inequality and “Spill-Over” in Mexico’s Education, Health, and

Nutrition Program. Washington, DC, International Food Policy Research Institute.

John F. Kennedy. (n.d.). John F. Kennedy Quote. Retrieved from

http://www.azquotes.com/quote/739664

Miguel, E., & Kremer, M. (2004). Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the

Presence of Treatment Externalities. Econometrica, 72(1), 159-217.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2004.00481.x

Parrish, E. D., Cassill, N. L., & Oxenham, W. (2006). Niche market strategy for a mature

marketplace. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 24(7), 694-707.

doi:10.1108/02634500610711860

Paul Schultz, T. (2004). School subsidies for the poor: evaluating the Mexican Progresa poverty

program. Journal of Development Economics, 74(1), 199-250.

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2003.12.009

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Niche market. Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market#cite_ref-1