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Advancing the Agency of Adolescent Girls
Abstract
More than 98 million adolescent girls are not in school. Can girls inuence their schooling without changes in their family's economic environment? In Rajasthan, India, we examine the impact of a school-based life skills program that seeks to address low aspirations, narrow societal roles for girls and women, restricted networks of social support, and limited decision-making power. We find the intervention causes a 25 percent decline in school dropout that persists from seventh grade through the transition to high school. Improvements in socioemotional support among girls exposed to the intervention seem especially important in their decision to stay in school.
... This aligns with wide-scale systematic reviews that explore the interplay between personality traits and economics [4,5]. Past literature suggests that building such socio-emotional skills can be important for human capital outcomes [6], including educational attainment [7,8] and health-related behaviour [9]. Finally, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to online and hybrid learning modes, SEL has important implications for educational outcomes. ...
... In India, the focus is on developing SEL is on girls and shifting gendered norms around education. Edmonds et al. [7] test whether group mentoring and life skills sessions can enhance women's agency in females, bridge perceptions of gender inequality, and improve females' schooling attainment. They find improvements in perceived gender equality among girls and boys, as well as a 30% fall in the dropout rate at the endline. ...
... Relative to the youngest age group (less than or equal to 11 years), we do not find that this impact varies by age group. However, the impact varies by gender: a girl that participated in the life skills intervention has a 55% increase in the odds of regularly attending school and this finding is in line with that of Edmonds et al., [7] where, after two years of the life-skills intervention 'Girls' Education Programme (GEP)' , a 30% reduction in dropout among adolescent girls was documented. This is particularly encouraging since at the baseline, being a girl child was associated with lower odds of regularly attending school. ...
Background
The Magic Bus India Foundation (MBIF) Life Skills program, known as the Childhood to Livelihood (C2L) program, aims to build life skills among adolescents aged 11 to 15 years. This three-year program focuses on education, gender equality, and socio-emotional skills development. The study evaluates both short-term and long-term impacts of the program on school-related outcomes and socio-emotional skills, providing insights into its effectiveness across multiple sites in India.
Methods
Data were collated from five study sites with a pre-post cohort research design. Baseline data were collected at the start, midline data at 18 months, and endline data at three years. The study used harmonized data across projects, with a sample of 1898 children for short-term analysis and a larger sample of 5582 children for long-term analysis. The empirical strategy involved panel data analysis using multiple linear regression models to evaluate program effects on outcomes such as school attendance, self-efficacy, resilience, and gender attitudes.
Results
The short-term analysis showed significant improvements in school attendance, aspirations, and socio-emotional skills among participants. On average, the C2L improved egalitarian gender attitudes by 0.6% points and perceived self-efficacy by 4% points in the short-run. Over the long-term, there was an average increase of 2.5 points in perceived self-efficacy, 1.1 points on resilience, and 0.45 points in egalitarian gender attitudes. The odds of regular school attendance increased by 66.5% points.
Conclusions
The C2L program has a positive impact on both educational and socio-emotional outcomes among adolescents. The findings suggest that life skills interventions can effectively enhance school attendance, self-efficacy, resilience, and gender attitudes. These results have important implications for policy, indicating that integrating socio-emotional learning (SEL) programs in school curricula can contribute to better educational and developmental outcomes for adolescents in resource-constrained settings.
... However, gender attitudes can change through participation in targeted interventions, although parental support continues to operate as an enabler [18,19]. Gender transformative interventions in India have been shown to improve health outcomes and reduce school dropouts [9,20,21]. Recent studies therefore point to the merits of broad youth development interventions which include financial literacy, sexual and reproductive health components and also show the need for further investigation into community-based interventions that seek to increase gender equity [20,22,23]. ...
... Gender transformative interventions in India have been shown to improve health outcomes and reduce school dropouts [9,20,21]. Recent studies therefore point to the merits of broad youth development interventions which include financial literacy, sexual and reproductive health components and also show the need for further investigation into community-based interventions that seek to increase gender equity [20,22,23]. ...
... The studies demonstrated the effectiveness of the intervention to achieve the outcomes of resilience and gender equal attitudes [21,25,30]. The qualitative and quasi-experimental studies clearly established the impact of this group intervention [30] and facilitation by local women assured cultural acceptability and safety of the intervention [20][21][22][23][24][25]. The current iteration was built on strengths of other interventions modelled for impacting resilience and gender equal attitudes, especially in girls [8,9]. ...
Background
Mental health problems are the leading cause of disease burden among young people in India. While evidence shows that youth mental health and resilience can be improved with group interventions in school settings, such an intervention has not been robustly evaluated in informal urban settings.
Objective
This study aimed to evaluate whether the Nae Disha 3 group intervention could improve youth resilience, mental health and gender equal attitudes among disadvantaged young people from low-income urban communities in India.
Methods
This cluster randomised controlled trial used an analytic sample of 476 adolescents and young adults aged 11–25 years from randomised clusters in urban Dehradun, India. The 251 intervention group participants were 112 boys and 139 girls, and the 225 young people in the wait-control group were 101 boys and 124 girls. Five validated tools measuring resilience gender equity and mental health were filled by participants at three different points in time.
Results
Difference in difference (DiD) analysis at T2 showed that scores improved among girls in intervention group, for adjusted model, resilience (DiD = 4.12; 95% CI: 2.14, 6.09) and among boys, for resilience (DiD = 5.82; 95% CI: 1.57, 9.74).
Conclusions
The Nae Disha 3 intervention among disadvantaged urban youth moderately improved resilience for both young men and women, though it did not significantly impact mental health, self-efficacy, or gender-equal attitudes. We establish potential merit for this approach to youth mental health but recommend further research to examine active ingredients and the ideal duration of such group interventions.
... Three RCTs evaluated the impact of school-based training sessions on schooling and child labour outcomes in Ghana, India and Peru (Berry et al. 2018;Edmonds et al. 2021;Gallego et al. 2018). ...
... The intervention also improved future planning, positive gender norms and sense of empowerment, as well as social and emotional support. However, test scores were not affected, possibly as learning outcomes can only be improved over longer time horizons (Edmonds et al. 2021). The authors found evidence that the main channel driving the reduction in school dropout was enhanced socioemotional support. ...
... Of the three RCTs discussed above, two showed small and mostly non-statistically significant effects of training programmes on child labour and child work outcomes (Berry et al. 2018;Edmonds et al. 2021), while one reported mixed impacts depending on the subsample considered (e.g., rural or urban, boys or girls) and the specific outcome indicator (e.g., participation or hours worked) (Gallego et al. 2018). ...
Progress towards eliminating child labour stalled for the first time in 20 years from 2016 to 2020. This slowdown puts at risk the international community’s efforts to eliminate child labour by 2025. Action is needed.
Child Work and Child Labour: The impact of educational policies and programmes in low- and middle-income countries is a rapid evidence assessment of the evidence on the effectiveness of educational policies and programmes in addressing child labour in low- and middle-income countries. It focuses on describing the causal impact of schooling programmes and policies on labour outcomes, based on experimental and quasi- experimental studies, and systematic reviews. To the extent information is available within the considered studies, it also identifies and discusses the main pathways and mechanisms of impact, as well as the programme design features that influence programme effectiveness.
... Recent evidence shows that programs which encourage adolescent girls to question restrictive norms, and act to improve their outcomes in spite of these, can be effective, especially at improving girls' participation in education (Buchmann et al. 2017;Edmonds et al. 2021). However, these studies do not address the question of whether such approaches achieve improvements in women's well-being. ...
... Despite the fact that adolescent girls are often a marginalized group within their communities, much of the existing literature on improving the outcomes of adolescent girls in contexts with restrictive norms intervenes solely with this group (Adoho et al. 2014;Buehren et al. 2016;Bandiera et al. 2017;Buchmann et al. 2017;Bergstrom andÖzler 2021). A few studies look at targeting young men and women together (Dhar et al. 2018;Edmonds et al. 2021) and men alone (Barker et al. 2017). None compare the efficacy of targeting different groups for creating norm change. ...
... We study a stand-alone girl group program which had not other components (such as providing girls with marketable skill, financial resources etc); we are thus able to attribute the positive effects we find on girls' behavior to the group activities. Recently, Edmonds et al. (2021), has shown that a life skills program administered to adolescent girls, also in rural Rajasthan, resulted in a significant reduction in school dropout and increased grade progression, mediated by an improvement in several life skills and gender attitudes. In the context of Bangladesh, Buchmann et al. (2017) find less promising results from a similar program. ...
This thesis explores the drivers of socio-economic and gender inequalities in material living standards, agency, health, and education. It combines four self-contained papers. The first chapter contains an introduction which summarizes how each subsequent chapter contributes to our collective understanding of the drivers of inqualities. The second chapter uses a RCT to evaluate two interventions designed to reduce the grip of highly restrictive gender norms on adolescent girls' education, marriage and wellbeing in rural Rajasthan. The first intervention comprised weekly ``girl groups'' designed to give girls the understanding, knowledge and social support to challenge restrictive norms. The second additionally engaged with the setters and enforcers of these norms. The third chapter explores how parents in Rajasthan, India decide how long to keep a daughter in school and when, and to who, to get her married. It combines a stated-choice experiment with a dynamic model of decision making to estimate parents’ preferences and their beliefs about the marriage market return to their daughter’s youth and education. The fourth chapter studies the impact of a nationwide policy (JSY) in India that sought to improve birth outcomes in disadvantaged communities by incentivizing pregnant women to give birth in a health facility rather than at home. The chapter develops a theoretical model of how incentivizing individuals to use healthcare might impact choices and health in the presence of congestion externalities. The fifth chapter uses a RCT to evaluate two approaches to improving the quality of Colombian preschools attended by socioeconomically disadvantaged children. The first provided preschools with resources to hire teaching assistants. The second additionally trained teachers to improve their pedagogical methods. The chapter sets out a model of how teachers allocate their, and their TA’s, time which sheds light on how teachers respond to the increase in TAs and to new information about the process of child development.
... In this literature, Blattman et al. (2017) finds that cognitive behavioral therapy targeting non-cognitive preferences substantially reduced participation in crime and violence among at-risk Liberian youth. Similarly, Ashraf et al. (2020) presents evidence that an intervention targeting negotiating skills among adolescent girls in Zambia significantly enhanced human capital outcomes over a threeyear horizon, and Edmonds et al. (2020) reports a positive effect of non-cognitive skills training on reducing dropout among girls in rural India. Adhvaryu et al. (2018) finds that on-the-job soft skills training increases productivity among female garment workers in India. ...
... The training provided through KYC also has some similarities to non-cognitive training interventions evaluated in previous literature. There is a substantial emphasis on negotiating skills, similar to Ashraf et al. (2020), and the focus on aspirations, future planning, and communication and negotiation is also similar to the non-cognitive training evaluated in Edmonds et al. (2020). 19 Arguably the most similar intervention is evaluated by Adhvaryu et al. (2018), who analyze an on-the-job soft skills training program that highlighted a similar set of topics (communication skills and negotiation, problem solving, execution and working in teams, stress management, financial literacy and management); the KYC training parallels this focus on imparting life skills in a vocational context, but the context centers around community service, rather than for-profit work. ...
... 19 The intervention evaluated in Liberia in Blattman et al. (2017), by contrast, is somewhat different given that it targets youth with a history of criminal and antisocial behavior; the only point of similarity is that self-control, a major focus of the Liberia program, is also identified as a competency for KYC. 20 This compares to 96 hours for cognitive behavioral therapy in Liberia (Blattman et al., 2017), 48 hours for non-cognitive training for adolescents in India (Edmonds et al., 2020), 14 hours for negotiating skills training for adolescents in Zambia (Ashraf et al., 2020), and 80 hours for on-the-job soft skills training for factory workers in India (Adhvaryu et al., 2018). 21 Unfortunately, the survey instrument did not collect detailed data on youth time allocation. ...
Integrating youth into communities and labor markets is a major challenge for developing countries, and incentives for community service are an increasingly popular tool to achieve this goal. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the Kazakhstan Youth Corps (KYC), a program comprising cash grants for community service projects and life skills training, on social capital for a sample of youth aged 18–29. We find little evidence that engaging youth in civic service and training has any positive effects one year post-intervention; there is no shift in attitudinal indices of social capital and no reported increase in volunteering or donations. Moreover, there is no effect of the intervention on secondary outcomes (life skills and human capital), and some evidence of a negative effect of the training-only intervention on the probability of reporting any income-earning activity.
... These programs are offered both in the community, providing safe spaces for both in-and out-of-school adolescents(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020a(Bandiera et al., , 2020bBuehren et al., 2017;Edmonds, Feigenberg, and Leight, 2023;Buchman et al., 2022), as well in school settings, incorporating programming into the curricula(Dhar, Jain, and Jayachandran, 2022;Ashraf et al., 2020).While findings from life skills programs are mixed(Buehren et al., 2017), they have been shown to increase engagement in income generating activities(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020aBuchman et al., 2022); decrease unintended teen pregnancy and early entry into marriage or cohabitation(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020a; protect adolescents from the worst effects of negative systemic shocks(Bandiera et al., 2020b); reduce school dropout and improve educational outcomes(Edmonds, Feigenberg, and Leight, 2023;Buchman et al., 2022;Ashraf et al., 2020); reduce experience of intimate partner violence(Shah et al., 2023); improve gender by guest on November 8, 2023. Copyright 2023 Downloaded from ...
... These programs are offered both in the community, providing safe spaces for both in-and out-of-school adolescents(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020a(Bandiera et al., , 2020bBuehren et al., 2017;Edmonds, Feigenberg, and Leight, 2023;Buchman et al., 2022), as well in school settings, incorporating programming into the curricula(Dhar, Jain, and Jayachandran, 2022;Ashraf et al., 2020).While findings from life skills programs are mixed(Buehren et al., 2017), they have been shown to increase engagement in income generating activities(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020aBuchman et al., 2022); decrease unintended teen pregnancy and early entry into marriage or cohabitation(Bandiera et al., 2019(Bandiera et al., , 2020a; protect adolescents from the worst effects of negative systemic shocks(Bandiera et al., 2020b); reduce school dropout and improve educational outcomes(Edmonds, Feigenberg, and Leight, 2023;Buchman et al., 2022;Ashraf et al., 2020); reduce experience of intimate partner violence(Shah et al., 2023); improve gender by guest on November 8, 2023. Copyright 2023 Downloaded from ...
... Studies have noted how competing discourses relate with each other, particularly, global discourses interacting with and shaped by local socio-political contexts [19], competing for dominance or indeed existing in plurality or hybridity [19][20][21], and sometimes perpetuating the lack of access to information and services for young people [22]. For this paper, a critical postcolonial perspective is drawn upon to understand the discourses that surround the increasing burden of adolescent fertility, highlighting the structural transformations that have impacted negatively on young people and their agency [23,24]; in this case, the ability to make fertility-control-related decisions. Epistemologically, the postcolonial critical perspective highlights the linkages among the domains of human experience-the psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic, in ways that show how inseparable they are [25], and their on-going manifestations in health and wellness of communities [26]. ...
... A study exploring the agency of adolescent girls in India showed that life-skills training boosted self-esteem and selfcon dence in adolescent girls increasing their ability to make decisions for themselves. Also, their value at the household-level was increased, thereby increasing their ability to negotiate their preferences [24]. ...
Background: Despite global and regional policies that promote the reduction of adolescent fertility through ending early marriages and reducing early child-bearing, adolescent fertility remains high in most sub-Saharan countries. This study aimed to explore the competing discourses that shape adolescent fertility control in Zambia.
Methods: A qualitative case study design was adopted, involving 33 individual interviews and 9 focus group discussions with adolescents and other key-informants such as parents, teachers and policymakers. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data critically.
Results: Adolescents’ age significantly reduced their access to Sexual and Reproductive Health, SRH services. Also, adolescent fertility discussions were influenced by marital norms and Christian beliefs, as well as health and rights values. While early marriage or child-bearing was discouraged, married adolescents and adolescents who had given birth before faced fewer challenges when accessing SRH information and services compared to their unmarried or nulliparous counterparts. Besides, the major influencers such as parents, teachers and health workers were also conflicted about how to package SRH information to young people, due to their varying roles in the community.
Conclusion: The pluralistic view of adolescent fertility is fueled by “multiple consciousnesses”. This is evidenced by the divergent discourses that shape adolescent fertility control in Zambia, compounded by the disempowered position of adolescents in their communities. We assert that the competing moral worlds, correct in their own right, viewed within the historical and social context unearth significant barriers to the success of interventions targeted towards adolescents’ fertility control in Zambia, thereby propagating the growing problem of high adolescent fertility. This suggests proactive consideration of these discourses when designing and implementing adolescent fertility interventions.
... A critical postcolonial perspective is drawn upon to understand the discourses that surround the increasing burden of adolescent fertility, highlighting the structural transformations that have impacted negatively on young people and their agency [16,17]; in this case, the ability to make fertility-controlrelated decisions. The postcolonial criticism highlights the linkages among the domains of human experience-the psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic, in ways that show how inseparable they are. ...
... A study exploring the agency of adolescent girls in India showed that life-skills training boosted self-esteem and self-con dence in adolescent girls increasing their ability to make decisions for themselves. Also, their value at the household-level was increased, thereby increasing their ability to negotiate their preferences [17]. ...
Background
Despite global and regional policies that promote the reduction of adolescent fertility through ending early marriages and reducing early child-bearing, adolescent fertility remains high in most sub-Saharan countries. This study aimed to explore the competing discourses that shape adolescent fertility control in Zambia.
Methods
A qualitative case study design was adopted, involving 33 individual interviews and 9 focus group discussions with adolescents and other key-informants such as parents, teachers and policymakers. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data critically.
Results
Adolescents’ age significantly reduced their access to SRH services. Also, adolescent fertility discussions were influenced by marital norms and Christian-religious beliefs, as well as health and rights values. While early marriage or child-bearing was discouraged, married adolescents and adolescents who had given birth before faced fewer challenges when accessing SRH information and services compared to their unmarried or nulliparous counterparts. Besides, the major influencers such as parents, teachers and health workers were also conflicted about how to package SRH information to young people, due to their varying roles in the community.
Conclusion
The pluralistic view of adolescent fertility is fueled by “multiple consciousnesses”. This is evidenced by the divergent discourses that shape adolescent fertility control in Zambia, compounded by the disempowered position of adolescents in their communities. We assert that the competing moral worlds, correct in their own right, viewed within the historical and social context unearth significant barriers to the success of interventions targeted towards adolescents’ fertility control in Zambia, thereby propagating the growing problem of high adolescent fertility. This suggests proactive consideration of these discourses when designing and implementing adolescent fertility interventions.
... Enhancing girls' agency in spouse selection, alongside building their overall agency, is a crucial strategy for improving contraceptive selfefficacy and enhancing spousal communication about family planning. Prior evidence from interventions for unmarried adolescent girls focused on life skills has demonstrated notable improvements in adolescent girls' agency, fostering more gender-equitable norms, reducing school dropout rates, and boosting girls' self-esteem and self-efficacy Edmonds et al., 2023). Future interventions should consider empowering married adolescent girls and young women to improve their contraceptive self-efficacy and spousal communication, further facilitating improved reproductive health outcomes. ...
Background
Marital choice of girls in India is low, with most marriages arranged entirely by parents and extended family members. Evidence on the relationship between marital choice and reproductive autonomy remains limited in India. This study sought to fill this critical gap by examining the association between marital choice, spousal communication, and contraceptive self-efficacy and use.
Methods
Data were analysed from the Understanding the Lives of Adolescents and Young Adults (UDAYA) survey, conducted in two north Indian states─ Uttar Pradesh and Bihar across rural and urban settings. Our analytic sample for analysis included 5,018 currently married adolescent and young adult girls aged 18–22 years at wave 2, 2018-19. We employed descriptive statistics, a chi-square test, and unadjusted and adjusted binary logistic regression models.
Results
Overall, 41.1% of girls had contraceptive self-efficacy and 17.5% used contraceptives. Girls’ involvement in spouse selection, either solely or jointly with parents –particularly when girls knew their husbands before marriage – was positively associated with spousal communication about fertility and contraception compared to those in parent-arranged marriages. Girls in self-choice marriages were linked to higher contraceptive self-efficacy (AOR: 1.56; 95 % CI: 1.24, 1.97) and increased contraceptive use (AOR: 1.68; 95 % CI: 1.25, 2.26) than parent-arranged marriages. Girls who knew their husbands before marriage in joint decision-making also showed higher odds of contraceptive use (AOR: 1.49; 95 % CI: 1.16, 1.92). However, the association between marital choice and contraceptive use was significant only in urban areas, not in rural areas.
Conclusion
Our study demonstrated that girls' involvement in spouse selection was associated with improved spousal communication, greater contraceptive self-efficacy, and increased contraceptive use, with significant contextual differences. Findings emphasized the critical role of girls’ agency in marital decisions and effective spousal communication in increasing contraceptive use tailored to specific contexts among newly married girls in India.
... Developing egalitarian gender beliefs early in life enables children, particularly girls to be empowered across their lifespan (Davis and Greenstein, 2009;Edmonds et al., 2021). Cultivating egalitarian gender beliefs among children is also crucial for shifting the entrenched social norms that perpetuate gender inequality and impede women's empowerment (Dhar et al., 2022;Jayachandran, 2021Jayachandran, , 2015. ...
Abundant studies have documented the positive impact of mothers' empowerment on children's health and education in the Global South, but little is known about how maternal empowerment shapes children's gender beliefs. Using data from the India Human Development Survey, this study examines the relationship between mothers' empowerment and adolescent children's gender beliefs in India. Recognizing the multidimensionality of women's empowerment, we conduct latent class analysis to identify a six-class empowerment typology based on mothers' education, employment, decision-making power at home, mobility outside the home, and memberships in women's organizations. The results reveal unevenness in different dimensions of mothers' empowerment. Maternal empowerment's association with egalitarian gender beliefs is salient among adolescent girls, but not boys. Adolescent girls with mothers labeled as proactive workers in our empowerment typology hold the most egalitarian gender beliefs, whereas low agency and underprivileged worker mothers' daughters are the least egalitarian. By illustrating the complex interplay between multiple dimensions of maternal empowerment and children's gender beliefs in India, this study advances the empirical and theoretical understanding of women's empowerment and the effects of mothers' behaviors on children's gender beliefs.
... Not only do actual skill levels matter, but individuals' perceptions of their skills affect their economic outcomes (Reuben et al. 2017;De Martino et al. 2022). Some literature has found a female disadvantage in SES (Ajayi et al., 2022), and interventions have focused on equipping women with SES to improve their economic empowerment and gender equality (Ashraf et al., 2020;Bandiera et al., 2020;Edmonds et al., 2021). However, this gender gap is typically documented in self-reported measures, which may capture individuals' perceptions of their skills, social desirability bias and other forms of response bias in addition to actual skill levels. ...
... Not only do actual skill levels matter, but individuals' perceptions of their skills affect their economic outcomes (Reuben et al. 2017;De Martino et al. 2022). Some literature has found a female disadvantage in SES (Ajayi et al., 2022), and interventions have focused on equipping women with SES to improve their economic empowerment and gender equality (Ashraf et al., 2020;Bandiera et al., 2020;Edmonds et al., 2021). However, this gender gap is typically documented in self-reported measures, which may capture individuals' perceptions of their skills, social desirability bias and other forms of response bias in addition to actual skill levels. ...
Individuals' socio-emotional skills (SES), and their perceptions of their skill levels, matter for labor market outcomes and other welfare outcomes. Men appear to have higher levels of SES than women, but this gender gap is typically documented in self-reported measures. Few studies use measures beyond self-reports-or seek to measure SES granularly and rigorously in large samples, especially in low-and middle-income countries. This paper deploys novel sets of self-reported and behavioral measures of 14 SES in a sample of more than 4,000 male and female youth not in full-time education, employment or training, in urban and peri-urban Tanzania. The findings show that men score higher than women on all 12 positively-worded self-reported measures. In contrast, gender gaps in behav-ioral measures are only observed for a few skills, and are far smaller in magnitude. The paper provides suggestive evidence that this pattern reflects men's overestimation of their own skills, rather than women's underestimation. In particular, there is a larger gap between self-reported and behavioral measures among men. Men's self-reports, and the gap between their self-reported and behavioral measures , are strongly correlated with measures of their social desirability and gendered beliefs about abilities-but this does not hold for women.
... Kabeer (1999) defines women's empowerment as the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire this ability. Literature in this vein identifies a number of possible drivers, including: women's self-help groups (Kumar et al., 2019;Roy, Hidrobo, Hoddinott, & Ahmed, 2019;Swain & Wallentin, 2009); information dissemination campaigns (e.g., about women's rights and legal protections, or how to effectively engage in politics and civic organizations); education or training that expands young women's economic prospects (Hung, Yoong, & Brown, 2012;Mocan & Cannonier, 2012;Dhar et al., 2019); training men on the benefits of empowering and working with women (Ismayilova et al., 2018;O'Sullivan, Jones, & Ambler, 2019;Gupta et al., 2013;Lecoutere et al., 2020); providing cash transfers to women (Molyneux & Thomson, 2011;Heath et al., 2019;Roy et al., 2019); mandating the participation of women in development programming (Beath et al., 2013); teaching life skills in school (Edmonds et al., 2019); offering modes of transportation (e.g., bicycles) to girls (Fiala et al., 2020); or exposing women to female role models (Beaman et al., 2009(Beaman et al., , 2012. However, policies and programs aimed at empowering women may also beget backlash if women's economic advancement is perceived as a threat to men or elders (Morgan & Buice, 2013). ...
How do perceptions of one’s relative economic status affect gender attitudes, including support for women’s economic participation and involvement in decision-making in their community and household? We conducted a 2018 survey experiment with female and male adults in approximately 1000 households in Papua New Guinea. Employing an established survey treatment to subtly alter respondents’ perception of their relative economic wellbeing, we find that increased feelings of relative deprivation make both men and women significantly more likely to support girls’ schooling and women’s paid employment, suggesting that relative economic insecurity can actually prompt support for women’s economic participation. However, increased feelings of relative deprivation may trigger greater intra-household tension. While increased perceptions of relative deprivation cause women to want more household decision-making authority, men’s attitudes toward women’s proper roles in decision-making are unchanged. In other words, increased support for women’s economic participation among men appears to stem mainly from a desire to raise household income, and not to alter the general role of women in society. The results underscore the multifaceted nature of gender attitudes, and how support for women’s economic participation may rise without simultaneous increases in women’s agency in decision-making.
We develop a new methodology to estimate subjective beliefs from hypothetical choice data. Our identification approach is based on the novel insight that by varying the amount of information on future realizations of stochastic variables, discrete choice experiments can identify not only preferences, but also subjective beliefs. We formally prove this result in a general setting and apply it to design a strategic survey instrument to measure Rajasthani parents’ subjective beliefs over the joint distribution of girls’ age of marriage, education, and marriage match quality. Our approach allows us to quantify the importance of perceived marriage market returns to education and youth, and perform various counterfactual simulation exercises. We find that eliminating the perceived marriage market return to education causes a 60% drop in the number of girls still in school at age-16, and almost none continue their education by age-18. Responses to our strategic survey instrument allow us accurately to predict realized schooling trajectories in follow-up data we collect from the same sample five years after our experimental data collection.
Empowering women is a policy goal that has received a lot of interest from policy-makers in the developing world in recent years, yet little is known about effective ways to promote it sustainably. Most existing interventions fail to address the multidimensional nature of empowerment. Using a double matching design to construct the sampling frame and to estimate causal effects, I evaluate the long-term impact of a multifaceted policy intervention designed to improve women’s empowerment in the Atlantic region in Colombia. This intervention provided information about women’s rights, soft skills and vocational training, seed capital, and mentoring simultaneously. I find that this intervention has mixed results: there are improvements in incomes and other economic dimensions along with large political and social capital effects, but limited or null impacts on women’s rights knowledge and control over one’s body. Using a list experiment, I even find an increase in the likelihood of intra-household violence. The results highlight the importance of addressing the multidimensional nature of women’s empowerment in policy innovations designed to foster it and incorporating men in these efforts.
This paper conducts a large, narrative review of interventions that might plausibly (a) increase educational attainment, (b) delay childbearing, and/or (c) delay marriage for adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Using 108 interventions from 78 studies, predominantly in LMICs, the paper summarizes the performance of 15 categories of interventions in improving these outcomes. Transfer programs emerge as broadly effective in increasing educational attainment but their effects on delaying fertility and marriage remain mixed and dependent on context. Construction of schools in underserved areas and the provision of information on returns to schooling and academic performance also increase schooling. No category of interventions is found to be categorically effective in delaying pregnancies and reducing child marriages among adolescent girls. While targeted provision of sexual and reproductive health services, including vouchers and subsidies for family planning, and increasing job opportunities for women seem promising, more research is needed to evaluate the longer-term effects of such interventions. We propose that future studies should aim to measure short-term outcomes that can form good surrogates for long-term welfare gains and should collect detailed cost information.
Background
Gender disparities in education continue to undermine girls' opportunities, despite enormous strides in recent years to improve primary enrolment and attainment for girls in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). At the regional, country and subnational levels gender gaps remain, with girls in many settings less likely to complete primary school, less likely to complete secondary, and often less likely to be literate than boys. The academic and policy literatures on the topic of gender‐related barriers to girls' education are both extensive. However, there remain gaps in knowledge regarding which interventions are most likely to work in contexts with different combinations of barriers.
Objectives
This systematic review identified and assessed the strength of the evidence of interventions and exposures addressing gender‐related barriers to schooling for girls in LMICs.
Search Methods
The AEA RCT Registry, Africa Bibliography, African Education Research Database, African Journals Online, DEC USAID, Dissertation Abstracts, EconLit, ELDIS, Evidence Hub, Global Index Medicus, IDEAS‐Repec, Intl Clinical Trials Registry, NBER, OpenGrey, Open Knowledge Repository, POPLINE, PsychINFO, PubMed, Research for Development Outputs, ScienceDirect, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, as well as relevant organization websites were searched electronically in March and April of 2019. Further searches were conducted through review of bibliographies as well as through inquiries to authors of included studies, relevant researchers and relevant organizations, and completed in March 2020.
Selection Criteria
We included randomized controlled trials as well as quasi‐experimental studies that used quantitative models that attempted to control for endogeneity. Manuscripts could be either published, peer‐reviewed articles or grey literature such as working papers, reports and dissertations. Studies must have been published on or after 2000, employed an intervention or exposure that attempted to address a gender‐related barrier to schooling, analyzed the effects of the intervention/exposure on at least one of our primary outcomes of interest, and utilized data from LMICs to be included.
Data Collection and Analysis
A team of reviewers was grouped into pairs to independently screen articles for relevance, extract data and assess risk of bias for each included study. A third reviewer assisted in resolving any disputes. Risk of bias was assessed either through the RoB 2 tool for experimental studies or the ROBINS‐I tool for quasi‐experimental studies. Due to the heterogeneity of study characteristics and reported outcome measures between studies, we applied the GRADE (Grading of Recommendation, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach adapted for situations where a meta‐analysis is not possible to synthesize the research.
Results
Interventions rated as effective exist for three gender‐related barriers: inability to afford tuition and fees, lack of adequate food, and insufficient academic support. Promising interventions exist for three gender‐related barriers: inadequate school access, inability to afford school materials, and lack of water and sanitation. More research is needed for the remaining 12 gender‐related barriers: lack of support for girls' education, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, lack of information on returns to education/alternative roles for women, school‐related gender‐based violence (SRGBV), lack of safe spaces and social connections, inadequate sports programs for girls, inadequate health and childcare services, inadequate life skills, inadequate menstrual hygiene management (MHM), poor policy/legal environment, lack of teaching materials and supplies, and gender‐insensitive school environment. We find substantial gaps in the evidence. Several gender‐related barriers to girls' schooling are under‐examined. For nine of these barriers we found fewer than 10 relevant evaluations, and for five of the barriers—child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, SRGBV, inadequate sports programs for girls, inadequate health and childcare services, and inadequate MHM—we found fewer than five relevant evaluations; thus, more research is needed to understand the most effective interventions to address many of those barriers. Also, nearly half of programs evaluated in the included studies were multi‐component, and most evaluations were not designed to tease out the effects of individual components. As a result, even when interventions were effective overall, it is often difficult to identify how much, if any, of the impact is attributable to a given program component. The combination of components varies between studies, with few comparable interventions, further limiting our ability to identify packages of interventions that work well. Finally, the context‐specific nature of these barriers—whether a barrier exists in a setting and how it manifests and operates—means that a program that is effective in one setting may not be effective in another.
Authors' Conclusions
While some effective and promising approaches exist to address gender‐related barriers to education for girls, evidence gaps exist on more than half of our hypothesized gender‐related barriers to education, including lack of support for girls' education, SRGBV, lack of safe spaces and social connections, inadequate life skills, and inadequate MHM, among others. In some cases, despite numerous studies examining interventions addressing a specific barrier, studies either did not disaggregate results by sex, or they were not designed to isolate the effects of each intervention component. Differences in context and in implementation, such as the number of program components, curricula content, and duration of interventions, also make it difficult to compare interventions to one another. Finally, few studies looked at pathways between interventions and education outcomes, so the reasons for differences in outcomes largely remain unclear.
Gender gaps in skills exist around the world but differ remarkably among countries. This paper uses a unique data set with more than 20,000 adolescents in rural India to explore gender gaps in cognitive and noncognitive skills. We find that boys have considerable advantages over girls on several indicators of cognitive and noncognitive skills that remains robust to a wide range of controls and specification choices. We also examine the correlates of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes, paying close attention to socioeconomic status (SES) and pro-female gender attitudes. We find a steep positive gradient in SES as well as for pro-female gender attitudes, with stronger associations between the SES gradient and skills. Further, high socioeconomic status and more pro-female gender attitudes are both strongly correlated with reducing the gender gap in cognitive and noncognitive outcomes.
There is an enormous interest in development interventions aimed at reducing behavioural poverty traps, including by raising women's and girls' aspirations, or future‐oriented goals. However, little is known about how women's aspirations influence their gender attitudes, the marriages into which they select and their involvement in intra‐household decision‐making. We find that women in Kyrgyzstan with higher aspirations are more likely to espouse egalitarian gender attitudes, as are their husbands, and their husbands have higher aspirations. They also live in households in which women play a greater role in decision‐making, and in which spouses are more likely to agree about women's roles in decision‐making.
Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls non-material resources -- specifically, negotiation skills -- can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased non-cognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents' educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls' outcomes by moving households' human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents.
A clustered randomized trial in Bangladesh examines alternative strategies to reduce child marriage and teenage childbearing and increase girls' education. Communities were randomized into three treatment and one control group in a 2:1:1:2 ratio. From 2008, girls in treatment communities received either i) a six-month empowerment program, ii) a financial incentive to delay marriage, or iii) empowerment plus incentive. Data from 15,464 girls 4.5 years after program completion show that girls eligible for the incentive for at least two years were 24% (-8.9ppts, p<0.01) less likely to be married under 18, 15% (-4.8ppts, p<0.05) less likely to have given birth under 20, and 25% (7.0ppts, p<0.01) more likely to be in school at age 22. Unlike other incentive programs that are conditional on girls staying in school, an incentive conditional on marriage alone has the potential to benefit out-of-school girls. We find insignificantly different effects for girls in and out of school at baseline. The empowerment program did not decrease child marriage or teenage childbearing. However, girls eligible for the empowerment program were 11% (3.0ppts, p<0.10) more likely to be in-school at age 22. We also find significant and large effects of the empowerment program on income-generating activities (IGAs): an increase in an IGA index by 0.5SDs (p<0.01).
Background:
Adolescent girls in Zambia face risks and vulnerabilities that challenge their healthy development into young women: early marriage and childbearing, sexual and gender-based violence, unintended pregnancy and HIV. The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) was designed to address these challenges by building girls' social, health and economic assets in the short term and improving sexual behavior, early marriage, pregnancy and education in the longer term. The two-year intervention included weekly, mentor-led, girls group meetings on health, life skills and financial education. Additional intervention components included a health voucher redeemable for general wellness and reproductive health services and an adolescent-friendly savings account.
Methods:
A cluster-randomized-controlled trial with longitudinal observations evaluated the impact of AGEP on key indicators immediately and two years after program end. Baseline data were collected from never-married adolescent girls in 120 intervention clusters (3515 girls) and 40 control clusters (1146 girls) and again two and four years later. An intent-to-treat analysis assessed the impact of AGEP on girls' social, health and economic assets, sexual behaviors, education and fertility outcomes. A treatment-on-the-treated analysis using two-stage, instrumental variables regression was also conducted to assess program impact for those who participated.
Results:
The intervention had modest, positive impacts on sexual and reproductive health knowledge after two and four years, financial literacy after two years, savings behavior after two and four years, self-efficacy after four years and transactional sex after two and four years. There was no effect of AGEP on the primary education or fertility outcomes, nor on norms regarding gender equity, acceptability of intimate partner violence and HIV knowledge.
Conclusions:
Although the intervention led to sustained change in a small number of individual outcomes, overall, the intervention did not lead to girls acquiring a comprehensive set of social, health and economic assets, or change their educational and fertility outcomes. It is important to explore additional interventions that may be needed for the most vulnerable girls, particularly those that address household economic conditions. Additional attention should be given to the social and economic environment in which girls are living.
Trial registration:
ISRCTN29322231. Trial Registration Date: March 04, 2016; retrospectively registered.
We study the impact of a program designed to accelerate the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls in South Sudan by simultaneously engaging them in vocational and life skills training through youth clubs. We build our evidence on a cluster-randomized study design and follow-up data that was collected about one year after the program ended. The time leading up to the follow-up survey was marked by conflict that erupted in December 2013 and affected around half of the adolescents or their immediate families in our sample. Taking conflict into account as a mediator for the program's effectiveness, we find that the intervention had positive impacts on a range of labor market and financial outcomes for girls who were not affected by the conflict. The program increased the probability of being engaged in income generation for adolescents in treatment areas that were not exposed to the conflict by almost 10 percentage points which was largely driven by non-farm self-employment. The program also significantly increased the likelihood that girls (not affected by the conflict) had any savings and controlled some cash on their own. The impact of the program on girls' social empowerment and the control over their own bodies, however, is ambiguous.
JEL Classifications: I25, J13, J24 2
Women in developing countries are disempowered: high youth unemployment, early mar- riage and childbearing interact to limit their investments into human capital and enforce dependence on men. We evaluate a multifaceted policy intervention attempting to jump- start adolescent women’s empowerment in Uganda, a context in which 60% of the popula- tion are aged below twenty. The intervention aims to relax human capital constraints that adolescent girls face by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction and marriage. We ...nd that four years post-intervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are 49pp more likely to engage in income generating activities, corresponding to a 48% increase over baseline levels, and an impact almost entirely driven by their greater engagement in self-employment. Teen pregnancy falls by a third, and early entry into marriage/cohabitation also falls rapidly. Strikingly, the share of girls reporting sex against their will drops by close to a third and aspired ages at which to marry and start childbearing move forward. The results highlight the potential of a multifaceted program that provides skills transfers as a viable and cost e¤ective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls over a four year horizon.
Background:
Secondary education and delayed marriage provide long-term socio-economic and health benefits to adolescent girls. We tested whether a structural and norms-based intervention, which worked with adolescent girls, their families, communities, and secondary schools to address poverty, schooling quality and gender norms, could reduce secondary school drop-out and child marriage among scheduled-caste/scheduled-tribe (SC/ST) adolescent girls in rural settings of southern India.
Methods:
80 of 121 villages in Vijayapura and Bagalkote districts, Karnataka State, were randomly selected (control = 40; intervention = 40). All 12-13 year-old SC/ST girls in final year of primary school (standard 7th) were enrolled and followed for 3 years (2014-2017) until the end of secondary school (standard 10th). Primary trial outcomes were proportion of girls who completed secondary school and were married, by trial end-line (15-16 years). Analyses were intention-to-treat and used individual-level girl data.
Results:
92.6% (2275/2457) girls at baseline and 72.8% (1788/2457) at end-line were interviewed. At end-line, one-fourth had not completed secondary school (control = 24.9%; intervention = 25.4%), and one in ten reported being married (control = 9.6%; intervention = 10.1%). These were lower than expected based on district-level data available before the trial, with no difference between these, or other schooling or sexual and reproductive outcomes, by trial arm. There was a small but significant increase in secondary school entry (adjusted odds ratio AOR = 3.58, 95% confidence interval CI = 1.36-9.44) and completion (AOR=1.54, 95%CI = 1.02-2.34) in Vijayapura district. The sensitivity and attrition analyses did not impact the overall result indicating that attrition of girls at end-line was random without much bearing on overall result.
Conclusions:
Samata intervention had no overall impact, however, it added value in one of the two implementation districts- increasing secondary school entry and completion. Lower than expected school drop-out and child marriage rates at end-line reflect strong secular changes, likely due to large-scale government initiatives to keep girls in school and delay marriage. Although government programmes may be sufficient to reach most girls in these settings, a substantial proportion of SC/ST girls remain at-risk of early marriage and school drop-out, and require targeted programming. Addressing multiple forms of clustered disadvantage among hardest to reach will be key to ensuring India "leaves no-one behind" and achieves its gender, health and education Sustainable Development Goal aspirations.
Trial registration:
ClinicalTrials.gov registration number NCT01996241.
We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children’s intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children’s own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The results persist almost 3 years after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and are robust across different experimental elicitation methods. The effects also extend beyond experimental outcomes: we find that treated students are significantly less likely to receive a low “behavior grade.”.
Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” social-psychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. When social-psychological interventions have lasting effects, it can seem surprising and even “magical,” leading people either to think of them as quick fixes to complicated problems or to consider them unworthy of serious consideration. The present article discourages both responses. It reviews the theoretical basis of several prominent social-psychological interventions and emphasizes that they have lasting effects because they target students’ subjective experiences in school, because they use persuasive yet stealthy methods for conveying psychological ideas, and because they tap into recursive processes present in educational environments. By understanding psychological interventions as powerful but context-dependent tools, educational researchers will be better equipped to take them to scale. This review concludes by discussing challenges to scaling psychological interventions and how these challenges may be overcome.
This paper provides evidence on the role of a child's peers in determining the decision to acquire education. Such social interactions may be important because children enjoy being similar to others or learn from other children. Identification is based on a randomized interven-tion that grants a cash subsidy encouraging school attendance among a sub-group of children within small rural villages in Mexico. Results indicate that (i) the ineligible children's decision to attend school is affected strongly by the school attendance choices in the peer group, (ii) social interactions are equally important among boys and girls, and in the upper grades of pri-mary school and lower grades of secondary school, and (iii) the direct effect of the cash grant on the eligible children is roughly of equal size as the effect generated via social interactions.
The common approach to the multiplicity problem calls for controlling the familywise error rate (FWER). This approach, though, has faults, and we point out a few. A different approach to problems of multiple significance testing is presented. It calls for controlling the expected proportion of falsely rejected hypotheses – the false discovery rate. This error rate is equivalent to the FWER when all hypotheses are true but is smaller otherwise. Therefore, in problems where the control of the false discovery rate rather than that of the FWER is desired, there is potential for a gain in power. A simple sequential Bonferroni-type procedure is proved to control the false discovery rate for independent test statistics, and a simulation study shows that the gain in power is substantial. The use of the new procedure and the appropriateness of the criterion are illustrated with examples.
This paper evaluates an intervention in India that engaged adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender equality for two years, aiming to reduce their support for societal norms that restrict women's and girls' opportunities. Using a randomized controlled trial, we find that the program made attitudes more supportive of gender equality by 0.18 standard deviations, or, equivalently, converted 16 percent of regressive attitudes. When we resurveyed study participants two years after the intervention had ended, the effects had persisted. The program also led to more gender-equal self-reported behavior, and we find weak evidence that it affected two revealed-preference measures. (JEL D63, D91, I21, J13, J16, 012)
We model and test two school-based peer cultures: one that stigmatizes effort and one that rewards ability. The model shows that either may reduce participation in educational activities when peers can observe participation and performance. We design a field experiment that allows us to test for, and differentiate between, these two concerns. We find that peer pressure reduces takeup of an SAT prep package virtually identically across two very different high school settings. However, the effects arise from very distinct mechanisms: a desire to hide effort in one setting and a desire to hide low ability in the other.
This paper examines the interaction between vocational and soft skills training on labor market outcomes and expectations of youth in the Dominican Republic. Applicants to a training program were randomly assigned to one of three modalities: a full treatment consisting of vocational and soft skills training plus an internship, a partial treatment consisting of soft skills training plus an internship, or a control group with no training or internship. We find strong and lasting effects of the program on personal skills acquisition and expectations, but results are markedly different for men and women. Shortly after completing the program, all participants reported increased expectations for improved employment and livelihoods. This result is reversed for male participants after three and a half years, potentially explained by the program's negative short-run labor market effects for that group. On the other hand, female participants experience improved labor market outcomes in the short run and exhibit substantially higher levels of personal skills after three and a half years; the women in the study became more optimistic and reported higher self-esteem. Men experienced no such benefits. Our results suggest that job-training programs of this type can be transformative – for women, life skills mattered and made a difference. But they can also have a downside if, as was the case for men in this study, training creates expectations that are not met. Although, overall, impacts are similar for the full treatment and the partial treatment, the positive impacts on soft skills for women, and the adverse impacts on labor outcomes and expectations for men are stronger for the full treatment.
Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls non-material resources -- specifically, negotiation skills -- can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased non-cognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents' educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls' outcomes by moving households' human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents.
Mind-sets (aka implicit theories) are beliefs about the nature of human attributes (e.g., intelligence). The theory holds that individuals with growth mind-sets (beliefs that attributes are malleable with effort) enjoy many positive outcomes—including higher academic achievement—while their peers who have fixed mind-sets experience negative outcomes. Given this relationship, interventions designed to increase students’ growth mind-sets—thereby increasing their academic achievement—have been implemented in schools around the world. In our first meta-analysis (k = 273, N = 365,915), we examined the strength of the relationship between mind-set and academic achievement and potential moderating factors. In our second meta-analysis (k = 43, N = 57,155), we examined the effectiveness of mind-set interventions on academic achievement and potential moderating factors. Overall effects were weak for both meta-analyses. However, some results supported specific tenets of the theory, namely, that students with low socioeconomic status or who are academically at risk might benefit from mind-set interventions.
We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a large representative household survey, we employ a triple difference approach (using boys and the neighboring state of Jharkhand as comparison groups) and find that being in a cohort that was exposed to the Cycle program increased girls' age-appropriate enrollment in secondary school by 32 percent and reduced the corresponding gender gap by 40 percent. We also find an 18 percent increase in the number of girls who appear for the high-stakes secondary school certificate exam, and a 12 percent increase in the number of girls who pass it. Parametric and non-parametric decompositions of the triple-difference estimate as a function of distance to the nearest secondary school show that the increases in enrollment mostly took place in villages that were further away from a secondary school, suggesting that the mechanism of impact was the reduction in the time and safety cost of school attendance made possible by the bicycle. We also find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls' secondary school enrollment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia.
This paper evaluates a program targeted to adolescent girls in Tanzania that aims to empower them economically as well as socially. The program was found to be highly successful in Uganda in terms of economic, health, and social outcomes. In contrast, this evaluation finds that the program did not have any notable effect on most of these outcomes in the Tanzanian setting. The evaluation also measures the impact of the program with and without microcredit services. The findings show that the addition of microcredit improves the take-up of the program and savings of the participants. The paper explores programmatic implementation information that helps explain the marked difference in outcomes between Uganda and Tanzania. This research shows that layering additional microfinance services onto an adolescent development program can be an effective tool to attain greater inclusion of youth in financial services, and brings out important issues of the generalizability of the research findings.
Over the course of just two years, at least six reviews have examined interventions that seek to improve learning outcomes in developing countries. Although the reviews ostensibly have the same objective, they reach sometimes starkly different conclusions. The first objective of this paper is to identify why reviews diverge in their conclusions and how future reviews can be more effective. The second objective is to identify areas of overlap in the recommendations of existing reviews of what works to improve learning. This paper demonstrates that divergence in the recommendations of learning reviews is largely driven by differences in the samples of research incorporated in each review. Of 229 studies with student learning results, the most inclusive review incorporates less than half of the total studies. Across the reviews, two classes of programs are recommended with some consistency. Pedagogical interventions that tailor teaching to student learning levels—either teacher-led or facilitated by adaptive learning software—are effective at improving student test scores, as are individualized, repeated teacher training interventions often associated with a specific task or tool. Future reviews will be most useful if they combine narrative review with meta-analysis, conduct more exhaustive searches, and maintain low aggregation of intervention categories. Education, Impact Evaluation, Human Capital.
I report the results of a field experiment in Gurgaon, India that offered cash and noncash incentives to learn either to children or to their parents. While I find no evidence that the identity of the recipient or form of the reward mattered in the aggregate, noncash incentives targeted to children were more effective for initially low- performing children while cash incentives were more effective for high- performing children. To explore the mechanisms behind this result, I present a model of household education production and find additional empirical results consistent with the model.
A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls' dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government's HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not reduce pregnancy or STI. Both programs combined reduce STI more, but cut dropout and pregnancy less, than education subsidies alone. These results are inconsistent with a model of schooling and sexual behavior in which both pregnancy and STI are determined by one factor (unprotected sex), but consistent with a two-factor model in which choices between committed and casual relationships also affect these outcomes.
This paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households in urban Brazil. We elicit parents' choices between monthly government transfers conditional on their adolescent child attending school and guaranteed, unconditional transfers of varying sizes. In the baseline treatment, an overwhelming majority of parents prefer conditional transfers to larger unconditional transfers. However, few parents prefer conditional payments if they are offered text message notifications whenever their child misses school. These findings suggest important intergenerational conflicts in these schooling decisions, a lack of parental control and observability of school attendance, and an additional rationale for conditional cash transfer programs- the monitoring they provide.
This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the treatment effect and family influence literatures. The evidence on the empirical and policy importance of credit constraints in forming skills is examined. There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions to shape skills at all stages of childhood. The next wave of family studies will better capture the active role of the emerging autonomous child in learning and responding to the actions of parents, mentors and teachers.
Data on crime in India are published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). These are compiled from records of police stations all over the country and refer to reported and registered crime. For recent years the data cover crimes against women in some detail, disaggregated to the district level. Reporting of crime tends to be incomplete; so the data are prima facie suspect. Nevertheless, they may be useful in studying regional variations, considering that underreporting is a universal feature. Social scientists have neglected the study of crime despite its increasing presence in our daily lives. This paper is an attempt to see what official, published data reveal, whether there are clear-cut regional patterns and if so whether they can lead to meaningful hypotheses for future work.
Across a range of contexts, reductions in education costs and provision of subsidies can boost school participation, often dramatically. Decisions to attend school seem subject to peer effects and time-inconsistent preferences. Merit scholarships, school health programs, and information about returns to education can all cost-effectively spur school participation. However, distortions in education systems, such as weak teacher incentives and elite-oriented curricula, undermine learning in school and much of the impact of increasing existing educational spending. Pedagogical innovations designed to address these distortions (such as technology-assisted instruction, remedial education, and tracking by achievement) can raise test scores at a low cost. Merely informing parents about school conditions seems insufficient to improve teacher incentives, and evidence on merit pay is mixed, but hiring teachers locally on short-term contracts can save money and improve educational outcomes. School vouchers can cost-effectively increase both school participation and learning.
This chapter summarizes the recent literature on peer effects in student outcomes at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. Linear-in-means models find modest sized and statistically significant peer effects in test scores. But the linear-in-means model masks considerable heterogeneity in the effects experienced by different types of students. Using nonlinear models, one prevalent finding is larger peer effects in which high ability students benefit from the presence of other high ability students. Studies that stratify students by race and ability often find that students are affected both by the racial composition of their peers and by the achievement of their same-race peers. At the university level, several studies find modest sized effects from dormmate and roommate background on own academic performance. For both university and high school students, the measured peer effects on "social" outcomes such as drinking are larger than the effects on academic outcomes. Many authors find substantial peer effects in drinking, drug use, and criminal behavior. This chapter suggest areas for future investigation and data collection.
This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next generation of empirical studies, and for formulating policy. Central to our analysis is the concept that childhood has more than one stage. We formalize the concepts of self-productivity and complementarity of human capital investments and use them to explain the evidence on skill formation. Together, they explain why skill begets skill through a multiplier process. Skill formation is a life cycle process. It starts in the womb and goes on throughout life. Families play a role in this process that is far more important than the role of schools. There are multiple skills and multiple abilities that are important for adult success. Abilities are both inherited and created, and the traditional debate about nature versus nurture is scientifically obsolete. Human capital investment exhibits both self-productivity and complementarity. Skill attainment at one stage of the life cycle raises skill attainment at later stages of the life cycle (self-productivity). Early investment facilitates the productivity of later investment (complementarity). Early investments are not productive if they are not followed up by later investments (another aspect of complementarity). This complementarity explains why there is no equity-efficiency trade-off for early investment. The returns to investing early in the life cycle are high. Remediation of inadequate early investments is difficult and very costly as a consequence of both self-productivity and complementarity.
This chapter reviews recent advances in the empirical literature on the role that households and families play in investing in human resources. It describes the estimation of reduced form demands for human capital, particularly education and health. Special attention is paid to the measurement and interpretation of the impact of household resources, particularly parental education, income, and impact of community resources, namely—prices and infrastructure. The process underlying the production of human capital is discussed. The chapter also discusses the difficulties in measuring inputs and input quality, and associated issues of estimation and interpretation. The chapter focuses on evidence regarding the influence of family background, school quality, ability, and self-selection. Models of household behavior in a dynamic setting are reviewed. The chapter discusses extensions to the model that is concerned with the flow and allocation of resources across and within households as well as to extensions that treat household boundaries as fluid.
We study how the distribution of other-regarding preferences develops with age. Based on a set of allocation choices, we classify each of 717 subjects, aged 8–17 years, as either egalitarian, altruistic, or spiteful. We find a strong decrease in spitefulness with increasing age. Egalitarianism becomes less frequent, and altruism much more prominent, with age. Females are more frequently classified as egalitarian than males, and less often as altruistic. By varying the allocation recipient as either an in-group or an out-group member, we also study how parochialism develops with age. Parochialism emerges
significantly in the teenage years.
A growing body of research highlights the importance of non-cognitive skills as determinants of young people's cognitive outcomes at school. However, little evidence exists about the effects of policies that specifically target students' non-cognitive skills as a way to improve educational achievements. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by studying a remedial education programme aimed at English secondary school pupils at risk of school exclusion and with worsening educational trajectories. The main peculiarity of this intervention is that it solely targets students' non-cognitive skills – such as self-confidence, locus of control, self-esteem and motivation – with the aim of improving pupils' records of attendance and end-of-compulsory-education (age 16) cognitive outcomes. We evaluate the effect of the policy on test scores in standardized national exams at age-16 using both least squares and propensity-score matching methods. Additionally, we exploit repeated observations on pupils’ test scores to control for unobservables that might affect students’ outcomes and selection into the programme. We find little evidence that the programme significantly helped treated youths to improve their age-16 test outcomes. We also find little evidence of heterogeneous policy effects along a variety of dimensions.
This paper identifies neighborhood peer effects on children's school enrollment decisions using experimental evidence from the Mexican PROGRESA program. We use exogenous variation in the school participation of program-eligible children to identify peer effects on the schooling decisions of ineligible children residing in treatment communities. We find that peers have considerable influence on the enrollment decisions of program-ineligible children, and these effects are concentrated among children from poorer households. These findings imply that policies aimed at encouraging enrollment can produce large social multiplier effects. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution. A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased math scores by 0.47 standard deviation. One year after the programs were over, initial gains remained significant for targeted children, but they faded to about 0.10 standard deviation. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the Job Corps program, one of the largest federally funded job training
programs in the U.S. Even with the aid of a randomized experiment, the impact of a training program on wages is difficult
to study because of sample selection, a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research. Wage rates are only observed
for those who are employed, and employment status itself may be affected by the training program. This paper develops an intuitive
trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection. In contrast to existing methods,
the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest. Identification results,
estimators, and their asymptotic distribution are presented. The bounds suggest that the program raised wages, consistent
with the notion that the Job Corps raises earnings by increasing human capital, rather than solely through encouraging work.
The estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection/attrition.
The Impact of Mentoring and Life Skills Training on Secondary School Progression and Child Labor Among Girls: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Rajasthan
- Edmonds
Women's Agency and Women's Employment: How Women's Sense of Agency Affects Their Labor Supply
- McKelway
The Skills to Pay the Bills: Returns to On-the-Job Soft Skills Training
- Adhvaryu
Household Social Consumption on Education in India
- National Statistical Office
Girl Power: Cash Transfers and Adolescent Welfare. Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Experiment in Malawi
- Baird
Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success
- Kautz