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ABSTRACT
This article reports on the impact on child schooling and work of the Government of Zambia’s Child Grant Program (CGP), an unconditional cash transfer programme targeted to households with children under age 3 years in three districts of the country. Although the CGP’s focus is on very young children, we look to see if the programme has impacts on older children who are not the explicit target group. We use data from a large-scale social experiment involving 2519 households, half of whom were randomised out to a delayed-entry control group, that was implemented to assess the impact of the programme. We find that the CGP has no discernible impact on school enrolment of children age 7–14. However, when we break the sample by older (11–14) and younger (7–10) children – based on the grade structure of the Zambian schooling system – we find a significant impact among children age 11–14, which coincides with the exact age range where a sharp drop-out begins to occur in Zambia with point estimates in the range of 7–8 percentage points. Finally, we provide evidence on the potential pathways through which the unconditional cash transfer impacts on enrolment. Households in the CGP spend more on education, and in particular on uniforms and shoes, two items cited as key barriers to school enrolment in study areas.
Acknowledgement
The members of the evaluation team, listed by affiliation and then alphabetically within affiliation are: American Institutes of Research (Juan Bonilla, Rosa Castro Zarzur, Cassandra Jessee, Claire Nowlin, Hannah Ring, David Seidenfeld); UNICEF-Zambia (Charlotte Harland, Paul Quarles van Ufford); Government of Zambia (Stanfield Michelo,Vandross Luwya, Manzunzo Zulu); UK Department for International Development-Zambia (KelleyToole); Palm Associates (Alefa Banda, Liseteli Ndiyoi, GelsonTembo, NathanTembo); University of North Carolina (Sudhanshu Handa); UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti (Sudhanshu Handa, Luisa Natali, Tia Palermo, Amber Peterman, Leah Principe).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. In Lesotho and Ghana programmes are nominally conditional but monitoring is not routinely performed. Tanzania is the only new programme with conditions that come with punitive sanctions.
2. Transfer Project presentation made at African Union Expert Consultation on Children and Social Protection, Cape Town, South Africa April 2014, available at http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/transfer/events/expert-consultation-meeting-on-children-and-social-protection-systems-in-africa/UNICEF_Handa_AU_v3.pdf .
3. Even though the cash transfer was not conditional on schooling, it was labelled an education support programme.
5. See evaluation reports from Ghana, Zambia and Lesotho at www.cpc.unc\projects\transfer.
6. The Ministry changed name to Ministry of Community Development, Mother and Child Health (MCDMCH) in 2013.
7. The sample size was determined through a power analysis to ensure that the study was able to detect meaningful effects. The 28 households per CWAC and 30 CWACs per district result from this power analysis.
8. On one hand, no differential attrition between the treatment and the control group is found and therefore internal validity is preserved. On the other hand, testing for overall attrition indicates that the overall baseline sample does not differ, on average, from those households that remain in the sample (after two and/or three years). Still, the highest attrition rate (9%) reported at 24-months is driven by migration out of Kaputa District due to the drying of the Cheshi Lake. However, many of these households were recovered by the third year follow up (that is, overall attrition at 36 month is only 2%). Details of these analyses are available in the evaluation reports on the Transfer Project website or by request from the correspondign authors.
9. Net School Enrolment measured as the total is the ratio of children of the official primary school age who are enrolled in primary school to the total population of the official primary school age.
10. World Development Indicators, World Bank
11. The average net intake ratio in grade 1 for the period 2004–2012 was 47.6 per cent. The average net intake ratio corresponds to the number of new entrants in the first grade of primary education who are of the official primary school-entrance age, expressed as a percentage of the population of the same age.
12. As suggested by the average gross intake ratio in grade 1 for the period 2004–2012, 118 per cent. The average gross intake ratio is the number of new entrants in the first grade of primary education regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the population of the official primary entrance age.
14. World Development Indicators, World Bank.
15. In 2010 units, the extreme poverty line is roughly Kwacha 90.5 and the moderate poverty line is roughly Kwacha 155.
16. The main evaluation reports for this study use pooled cross sectional DD impact estimates, which compare children age 7–14 with children of the same age at follow-up. This approach does not take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the study. The evaluation reports containing these estimates are publically available at http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/transfer/countries/zambia.
17. The ‘treated’ variable in each of these tables is not statistically significant indicating no difference at baseline between the treatment and control group.
18. Results are available upon request.
19. We also estimated the DD using the balanced panel sample and results are consistent – these are available upon request.
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Notes on contributors
Sudhanshu Handa
Sudhanshu Handa is Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina and was on leave at UNICEF Office of Research when this paper was written. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the effects of public policy on human resources in developing countries. He previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Food Policy Research institute and the University of the West Indies.
Luisa Natali
Luisa Natali is a researcher at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti and a PhD candidate in Development Economics at Sussex University. She has previously worked as a research consultant for ODI, IDS and DfID. Her research interests lie in social policy and social protection, and in particular in the evaluation of cash transfer programmes, child well-being, poverty and vulnerability analysis, and the economics of gender.
David Seidenfeld
David Seidenfeld is Senior Director of International Research and Evaluation at the American Institutes for Research. He holds a PhD in Policy Measurement and Evaluation from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the effects of programmes and interventions on poverty reduction in developing countries.
Gelson Tembo
Gelson Tembo is Executive Director of Palm Associates and Lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zambia. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Oklahoma State University. He has a wide range of research interests including agricultural technology adoption, health and child nutrition.