Conditional Cash Transfers, paying low-income parents if their children attend school, have been successful at fighting poverty in Mexico and Brazil. Can a similar program work in Morocco? We are partnering with the Government of Morocco to test different ways of implementing their program. We hope to discover whether the program is successful in improving school enrolment, attendance, academic achievement, and household consumption.
Approximately 85% of primary school age children in western Kenya are enrolled, however only about one-third of students finish primary school. Dropout rates are typically higher for girls. Results suggest that the Girls Scholarship Program led to persistent test score gains in pupils from treatment schools five years after the program. Girls from treatment schools were also more likely to be enrolled in school and to have attended some secondary school at the time of the long-term follow up survey.
Hundreds of millions of children worldwide are infected with parasitic worms. These worms are detrimental to children's health, their cognitive development, their education and their futures. Chronic illness caused by worm infections reduces literacy and adult productivity.
Free deworming treatment substantially improved student attendance and health. The program also had significant "spillover" effects, improving health outcomes and attendance among students in neighboring primary schools.
Including the spillover benefits of treatment, the cost of keeping a child in school one additional day is only US$0.02, which makes deworming considerably less expensive than any alternative method of increasing primary school participation.
Given the great success of this project, IPA is now working to Scale Up school-based deworming in partnership with Deworm the World.
The Hunger Project (THP) works towards tackling poverty in Africa by partnering with local people to establish community centers ("epicenters") offering a comprehensive range of services, from health and education, to agriculture, microfinance, water and sanitation, as well as fostering community spirit. The centers aim to be economically sustainable within 5 years.
Many more children are now going to school but improving the quality of education remains a challenge, with attendance not always translating into learning outcomes. Remedial tutoring is a cheap and successful way of helping the lowest-achieving students of rural India catch up to their classmates.
Policy Issue:
Nearly 40% of children in Africa and Asia suffer from iron deficiency anemia (IDA), which can result in weakness, stunted physical growth, and a compromised immune system. Intestinal helminths (worms) cause chronic intestinal blood loss which contributes to iron deficiency anemia. Worms are prevalent among children in developing countries and are believed to have a negative impact on education, impacting child cognitive and physical development as well as school attendance. Estimates suggest that the impact of iron deficiency anemia—through both physical and cognitive channels—could be as large as 4% of GDP on average in less developed countries, yet there is little rigorous work by economists on the effects of anemia on economic development.
"Brain drain", or the emigration of skilled workers, is one of the most common concerns African countries have about migration. Yet migration, broadly speaking, plays a significant role in economic development in the form of remittances and continued interaction of migrants with their home countries.
Kenya’s education system blends substantial centralization with elements of local control and school choice. This project looks at the system of incentives created by elements of decentralization.
Policy Issue:
In recent years school enrollment has risen dramatically in developing countries, prompting a renewed interest among policymakers in education management. Provision of educational services is centrally administered in much of the developing world, but evidence suggests that decentralized, locally administered services may be better suited to address low education quality. Local administration and oversight puts power into the hands of those with the most interest in seeing improvements in service delivery, and the best information about current education quality. By empowering local communities, decentralized management has the potential to combat systemic teacher absenteeism and reduce misallocation and corruption.
What is the best way of empowering adolescent girls? Rights-based campaigns? Skills training? Researchers are cooperating with the Bangladesh office of Save the Children USA to evaluate a broad range of interventions.
