When Malawi Paid Girls to Attend School: A Story of How a Clever Initiative Created an Impact
Malawi is among the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Around 80 percent of the Nation’s population lives in rural areas, 9.1 percent of the total population is a victim of HIV (as of 2015), and life expectancy at birth is a mere 50.03 years. With high levels of income disparity, the country is considered poor not only in global terms, but also according to the standards of Sub Saharan Africa. In order to tackle some of these problems, Malawi initiated a Conditional Cash Transfer program to increase school attendance and reduce risky sexual behavior among adolescent girls.
Conditional Cash Transfers, or CCTs, are government or non-government initiated programs that transfer cash or distribute wealth to a certain number of people, or a certain section of the society. These programs aim to improve the socioeconomic conditions of such social groups for parameters ranging from healthcare, and financial wellbeing, to sexual hygiene, psychological wellbeing, and education. Upon the listing of target parameters and the target population, Conditional Cash Transfer programs are run to assess and improve the living conditions of the selected target population for a specific period of time.
Many countries around the world have initiated CCTs and have seen successful or desired results up to a certain degree. Bangladesh established the Female Secondary School Assistance Project in 1994 and provided tuition and stipends to girls upon the condition of their regular school attendance and unmarried status. Panama initiated the Red de Oportunidades to its population under 18 to provide them better access to healthcare services and education. The United States initiated the Opportunity NYC Family Rewards program, a Conditional Cash Transfer scheme, to test the impact of monetary incentives on children’s education, family health, and adult’s workforce outcomes. The list is not exhaustive, but the idea is clear — countries implement CCTs to work on various societal problems that they believe need attention. Malawi is one such case that demonstrates the impact a CCT program can have in reinforcing girls to go to school.
Malawi’s program divided girls into separate groups. The control group was one that neither received the CCT nor the Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT). The intervention group was divided into two treatment arms — one would give cash on the condition that girls attended school at least 80% of the time in a given month — the CCT arm — and the other would give cash unconditionally no matter whether or not the girls attended the school — the UCT arm. The two treatment arms were further subdivided into two groups, baseline schoolgirl (or simply schoolgirls), and baseline dropouts (or simply school dropouts). Baseline Schoolgirls had girls who were already in school at the beginning of the program, and Baseline Dropouts had girls who had already dropped out of school at the beginning of the program. The intention behind this precise division was to see if the program had any capability in reducing the school dropout rate, and could indeed encourage dropout female students to start school again.
The programs not only distributed cash to the family members of these girls, but also made a point that the participants themselves — in our case, the girls — were also receiving cash payments. This way, the designers of the program thought, a larger impact was possible in the lives and self-esteem of these girls. Following this and the execution of the program, two interventions were made to record the observations that could have been a result of the program.
The impacts were observed in terms of changes in educational, sexual, and school related behavior for girls from the CCT and the UCT arms. According to the two interventional observations made during the course of the program, the CCT arm saw a 42% increase in spending by school dropouts, while the increase for the schoolgirls was 80%. The CCT program had a strong effect on school enrollment and retention among the schoolgirl group. Out of a maximum of six possible school terms, the program improved the average number of terms enrolled by 0.54 over a base of 4.79. For school dropouts, there was an increase of 2.35 terms up from a 1.02. This meant that the program was now able to retain students in schools and not let them drop out sooner, as was usually the case earlier.
But educational impacts were not limited to an increase in enrollment and retention periods. The program also noticed that among schoolgirls, there were statistically significant improvements in math, English, and cognitive test scores and that both CCT groups — Baseline Schoolgirls and Baseline Dropouts — saw an increase in the probability of participating in health training during the past 12 months.
The programs impact were also felt across other areas. CCTs significantly reduced pregnancy among school dropouts during the first year of the program. They were 5.1 percent less likely to be pregnant during the first interventional survey and 8.2 percent less likely during the second interventional survey. Unsurprisingly, the number of months the respondents would like to wait before bearing children also increased for both the groups by the second intervention. Even the ideal number of children wanted decreased for both CCT groups.
The impact was also felt in areas like marriage. CCT’s school dropout group was 12.6 percent less likely to be married than the control group. Interestingly, the dropout group also saw education as an important characteristic in a future spouse.
In terms of the girl’s position in the household, both the groups felt to be important members of the family with a relative increase in autonomy and decision making power as compared to the control group participants. Nutrition and health also saw significant changes for both the groups. On one hand protein intake for the groups surged, and on other malarial preventative measures such as likelihood of sleeping under a mosquito bed net also increased. These findings also resonated with an increase in school attendance during term 1, when the number of Malaria cases reaches its peak in Malawi. Impacts on other areas like mental health, psychological health, and improved self-esteem were also significant for both the groups.
The impact for the Unconditional Cash transfer program were more statistically significant under all areas, except for factors pertaining to bearing children, marriage, and ideal number of children. It seemed like under the UCT program, girls would not make desired choices that would push the age for bearing children, delay their ideal age for marriage, and reduce the ideal number of children they would like to bear. They also performed poorly in areas related to testing, education, and awareness about health and nutrition. It seemed as if in the absence of schooling incentivized cash transfer, girls could not use the financial opportunity provided as an incentive to better improve their human capital and consequently, their sexual, maternal, and physical health. While the UCT programs were less strenuous for girls, they clearly downplayed on several important factors meant to improve socioeconomic living standards.
The program and the trial made it absolutely clear that programs like CCT can have a clear impact on the target population, provided all the protocols are well followed. CCT in the case of Malawi had a statistically significant impact in informing girls about sexual health and choices, educating and increasing their human capital, delaying their preferred age for marriage, and increasing their enrollment and retention in school. While the magnitude of an impact this might have had may not be as impressive to some analyst, it becomes clear that if a program of this type is applied further for a longer period of time, and promises to offer a higher financial incentive, there are chances that an impact of a greater magnitude could be manifested. Overall, the case is clear in its assertion: Conditional Cash Transfers do work to bring about changes desired provided they are well planned and thoroughly analyzed.
References:
Baird, Sarah, Ephraim Chirwa, Jacobus De Hoop, and Berk Özler. “Girl Power: Cash Transfers and Adolescent Welfare. Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Experiment in Malawi.” 2013. doi:10.3386/w19479.
Pettifor, Audrey, Sandra I. Mccoy, and Nancy Padian. “Paying to Prevent HIV Infection in Young Women?” The Lancet379, no. 9823 (2012): 1280–282. doi:10.1016/s0140–6736(12)60036–1.
Harries, Anthony. “Faculty of 1000 Evaluation for Effect of a Cash Transfer Programme for Schooling on Prevalence of HIV and Herpes Simplex Type 2 in Malawi: A Cluster Randomised Trial.” F1000 — Post-publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, 2012. doi:10.3410/f.716997876.792302886.
