Girl Power: Stipend Programs and the Education of Younger Siblings

Begum, Lutfunnahar; Islam, Asad; Smyth, Russell

doi:10.1080/00220388.2016.1277020

“…The share of older students taking the exam increased in poorer districts, consistent with negative selection. Enrollment spillovers to boys occurred only in households with older girls enrolled in school, consistent with programs in other countries in which reduced schooling costs for girls increased male enrollment within a household (Kim et al 1999a;Begum et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…We also contribute to the broader literature on efforts to close the gender gap in access and learning. Several other studies have evaluated similar programs targeting girls (Kim et al 1999a, 1999b, and Chaudhury and Parajuli 2010Filmer and Schady 2008 for Cambodia;Kremer et al 2009 for Kenya;Baird et al 2011 for Malawi;Begum et al 2012 for Bangladesh; and the previously mentioned Kazianga et al 2013 andPrakash 2013 for Burkina Faso and India, respectively), with a consensus finding that reducing the cost of attendance leads to gains in enrollment. Of these, however, only Baird et al (2011) examines learning outcomes among secondary school students as we do, using a program more local in scope than our setting.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Financial Constraints and Girls’ Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

Blimpo

¹

,

Gajigo²,

Pugatch

³

2016

The World Bank Economic Review

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We assess the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased access to secondary education substantially without harming learning outcomes. We find an increase of around 50% in the number of girls and boys taking the high school exit exam from a low baseline, as well as a 0.1 standard deviations gain in test scores in response to the program. This result is notable in a setting where expanded access could put additional strains on limited resources and the quality of schools. These findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in lowincome countries like The Gambia.JEL Classification: O15, I21, C93

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“…In Bangladesh, since the mid-1990s, the government has introduced many education policies targeting female children, including compulsory free primary education and a female stipend program in secondary schools in rural areas. These policies have led to more gender parity in enrolment in both primary and lower-secondary levels (Begum et al, 2017;Hahn et al, 2018), but female students still lag behind their male counterpart in learning outcomes (Asadullah and Chaudhury, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friendship and Female Education: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladeshi Primary Schools

Hahn

¹

,

Islam

²

,

Patacchini

³

et al. 2019

The Economic Journal

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We randomly assigned 115 primary schools in Bangladesh to one of two settings: children studying in groups with friends and children studying in groups with peers. The groups consisted of four people with similar average cognitive abilities and household characteristics. While the achievement of male students was not affected by the group assignment, low-ability females with friends outperformed low-ability females working with peers by roughly 0.4 standard deviations of the test score distribution. This is not due to the fact that friends tend to be of the same gender or to a higher frequency of interactions among friends.

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“…21 Compared to private school students, students in public schools earn higher scores, particularly in English (0.16 standard deviations for girls 20 Other programs that targeted girls for reduced schooling costs have also shown increases in male enrollment (Kim et al, 1999a;Begum et al, 2012), which the authors explain as a spillover to male siblings. Our data do not allow us to distinguish siblings among test takers or enrolled in other grades, however.…”

Section: Zeromentioning

confidence: 97%

Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

Blimpo¹,

Gajigo²,

Pugatch³

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We assess the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased access to secondary education substantially without harming learning outcomes. We find an increase of around 50% in the number of girls and boys taking the high school exit exam from a low baseline, as well as a 0.1 standard deviations gain in test scores in response to the program. This result is notable in a setting where expanded access could put additional strains on limited resources and the quality of schools. These findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in lowincome countries like The Gambia.JEL Classification: O15, I21, C93

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Girl Power: Stipend Programs and the Education of Younger Siblings

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Financial Constraints and Girls’ Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

Financial Constraints and Girls’ Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

Friendship and Female Education: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladeshi Primary Schools

Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

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