Descrição

Reducing gender gaps in school enrollment has been one of the most important
goals for international education policy over the past decade, and was one of
the eight United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s).1 While considerable
progress has been made in reducing gender gaps in primary schooling, there
continue to be significant gaps in secondary schooling, with a noticeable increase
in adolescent years (Figure 1, panel A). It is therefore of considerable economic
and policy interest to identify cost-effective and scalable strategies for increasing
secondary school enrollment and completion rates for girls in developing countries.
Policies to improve female educational attainment in developing countries have
focused on both increasing the immediate benefits of schooling to families as well
as on reducing the costs of attending school. The most commonly used demand-side
intervention to increase female schooling has been to provide conditional cash transfers
(CCTs) to households for keeping girls enrolled in school. Several well-identified
studies of CCT programs have found a positive impact on girls’ school enrollment
and attainment (Fiszbein and Schady 2009).2 However, they have not been found
to be a very cost effective way of improving girls’ schooling attainment, perhaps
because CCT programs typically aim to also provide income support to the poor and
not only to increase girls’ schooling (Dhaliwal et al. 2013, Pritchett 2012).