What we're reading at RSA Global

Have a look at the selection of articles the RSA Global Team have been reading over the past month! They include articles on technology and refugee education, artificial intelligence, universal basic income in India and social entrepreneurship.

Education

Although the East Asia and the Pacific region is well known for high performing educational systems, this is not evenly distributed throughout the region. According to the World Bank, there are pockets of schools systems struggling to escape the global learning crisis. A recent World Bank report examines different country experiences on achieveing educational reform at scale in the East Asia and Pacific region. For more on the World Bank report Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific, please visit this link.

A recent UNESCO report, A lifeline to learning – leveraging technology to support education for refugees, seeks to capture the potential of mobile technology in addressing refugee education and learning challenges. The report highlighted projects from diverse contexts which provides valuable insights on how it can be applied to different localities. For more on this report, visit this link.

In a recent blog post, Rebecca Winthrop from Brookings Institution, reviewed the education challenges in Latin America and showcased examples of innovative practices which addresses these challenges. The practices were highlighted in last year’s report Can We Leapfrog? The Potential of Education Innovations to Rapidly Accelerate Progress that catalogues over 3000 global innovations  which has the potential to accelerate progress in education.

Economy

Earlier this year, Carnegie India published a report entitled India’s Universal Basic Income - Bedevilled by details which examined the feasibility of implementing a UBI in India. The report was further supported by a public event where experts discussed basic income experiments, state capacity and the role of politics in building legitimacy and an online event which examined the Indian Ministry of Finance Economic Survey proposal on UBI and how it can be implemented in India. For more on the report please visit this link.

Artificial Intelligence: The Great Disruptor is the collection of a range of perspectives from the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence held last summer. The report includes the impact of AI on journalism, healthcare and automotive industries. For more, please visit the link here. Also, last week President Macron committed €1.5 Billion to making France a leader in Artificial Intelligence. His speech which laid out France’s AI strategy was largely based on recommendations of this report by Cédric Villani.

The latest World Bank Report on the European Union Growing United – Upgrading Europe’s convergence machine does a deep dive on the growing divides across the EU – 1) growing productivity divide across countries and regions and 2) increasing household income inequality. Chapter 2 looks at the Future of Work and the implications of technological change for workers and firms and Chapter 3 reviews how well the EU provides equal opportunities for people and what improvements need to be made in light of changes in the future of work. An overview of the report can be found here. For the full report, please visit this link.

Public Services

The Brookings Report entitled Examining the local value of economic development incentives reviews economic development transactions from four major US cities. The report seeks to provide a framework inclusive economic development to help decision making by local leaders. For more on the report, please visit this link.

A recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article posited that social entrepreneurship is not enough to drive social change. The article, “Social Enterprise is not social change” sparked much heated debate and commentary so much so that the authors wrote a follow up note in response. Have a look at the article here and please see the response by authors in the note at the bottom.

The Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions report, The Public Wealth of Cities reveals how cities can unlock public assets and propel economic development and progress. The report advocates for an urban wealth fund which will independently manage a city’s commercial assets for more on this, please visit this link.