Designing Cost-Effective Cash Transfer Programs to Boost Schooling among Young Women in Sub-Saharan Africa
As of 2007, 29 developing countries had some type of conditional cash transfer program in place, with many others planning or piloting one. However, the evidence base needed by a government to decide how to design a new conditional cash transfer pr...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20091022113350 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4282 |
| Summary: | As of 2007, 29 developing countries had
some type of conditional cash transfer program in place,
with many others planning or piloting one. However, the
evidence base needed by a government to decide how to design
a new conditional cash transfer program is severely limited
in a number of critical dimensions. This paper presents
one-year schooling impacts from a conditional cash transfer
experiment among teenage girls and young women in Malawi,
which was designed to address these shortcomings:
conditionality status, size of separate transfers to the
schoolgirl and the parent, and village-level saturation of
treatment were all independently randomized. The authors
find that the program had large impacts on school
attendance: the re-enrollment rate among those who had
already dropped out of school before the start of the
program increased by two and a half times and the dropout
rate among those in school at baseline decreased from 11 to
6 percent. These impacts were, on average, similar in the
conditional and the unconditional treatment arms. Although
most schooling outcomes examined here were unresponsive to
variation in the size of the transfer to the parents, higher
transfers given directly to the schoolgirls were associated
with significantly improved school attendance and progress -
but only if the transfers were conditional on school
attendance. There were no spillover effects within treatment
communities after the first year of program implementation.
Policymakers looking to design cost-effective cash transfer
programs targeted toward young women should note the
relative insensitivity of these short-term program impacts
with respect to conditionality and total transfer size. |
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