Search

This paper evaluates the effects of a program that transferred different amounts of cash to poor households in rural Guinea. The program’s aim was to improve children’s schooling and health outcomes in the immediate aftermath of the Ebola pandemic. In treated villages, households received cash conditional only on attending trainings promoting good health practices and schooling. The program randomized at two levels. The first level was between treated and control villages. The second level was within treated villages. Households were randomly distributed in three treatment arms: (i) no cash transfer, (ii) a cash transfer of 8 USD/quarter/child over two years, and (iii) a cash transfer twice as large as in group (ii). School enrollment increased nationwide and rapidly in the aftermath of Ebola. The authors find that it increased significantly more in treated villages. From a low baseline of around 40 percent of primary-school-age enrollment, treated villages increased their school enrollment by more than 11 percentage points compared to control villages. The effect is higher for larger cash transfers compared to those with no cash transfers in treated villages. School enrollment also increased among untreated households in treated villages, probably due to a combined effect—which cannot be differentiated—from spillovers and from the information campaigns. Despite the massive increase in school enrollment, there is no evidence of effects on learning measures. Health inputs such as vaccination deteriorated overall in Guinea in the aftermath of Ebola, and the program did not mitigate this fall.

This study conducted a randomized control trial in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education, health, and household welfare outcomes. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional and were given to either mothers or fathers. Conditionality was linked to older children enrolling in school and attending regularly and younger children receiving preventive health check-ups. Compared with the control group, cash transfers improve children's education and health and household socioeconomic conditions. For school enrollment and most child health outcomes, conditional cash transfers outperform unconditional cash transfers. Giving cash to mothers does not lead to significantly better child health or education outcomes, and there is evidence that money given to fathers improves young children's health, particularly during years of poor rainfall. Cash transfers to fathers also yield relatively more household investment in livestock, cash crops, and improved housing.

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child's siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent's decision of whether and how much to invest in their child's education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability.

Civil war, and genocide in particular, are among the most destructive of social phenomena, especially for children of school-going age. In Rwanda school enrollment trends suggest that the school system recovered quickly after 1994, but these numbers do not tell the full story. Two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide are used to compare children in the same age group who were and were not exposed to the genocide - and their educational outcomes are substantially different. Children exposed to the genocide experienced a drop in educational achievement of almost one-half year of completed schooling, and are 15 percentage points less likely to complete third or fourth grade. Sustained effort is needed to reinforce educational institutions and offer a"second chance"to those youth most affected by the conflict.