Children’s schooling and work in the presence of a conditional cash transfer program in rural Colombia

Latin America

Colombia

Social Protection

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT)

O Attanasio, E Fitzsimons, A Gomez, et al

2010

Attanasio O., Emla Fitzsimons, Ana Gomez, Martha Isabel Gutiérrez, Costas Meghir, Alice Mesnard "Children’s Schooling and Work in the Presence of a Conditional Cash Transfer programme in Rural Colombia", Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2010.
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2010

Familias en Acción

2001-ongoing

To alleviate long-run poverty by fostering the accumulation of human capital among children living in indigent households and reduce current poverty through the transfer payment

Implementation in 622 ‘municipalities’ in 26 ‘departments’ selected by Fondo de Inversiones para la Paz (FIP) on the basis of the following four criteria: 1) the municipality had to have access to basic education and health infrastructure; 2) the municipality had to have at least one bank; 3) the municipality had to have fewer than 100,000 inhabitants and not be the capital of a regional district and not be in the coffee region that received special help as a consequence of the 1995 earthquake; 4) the local authority had to register the municipality to the programmeme and provide a number of documents, including the lists of ‘SISBEN1’ (a basic welfare indicator more or less routinely collected for all families in Colombia) beneficiaries. All families registered with ‘SISBEN1’ in December 1999 in the targeted municipalities, and with children aged 0-17 years, were potential beneficiaries of the programmeme.

The programmeme, implemented in rural areas, consists of conditional subsidies for investments into education, nutrition, and health. The nutrition component consists of a basic monetary supplement that is given to all beneficiary families with children aged less than 7 years. The health component consists of a vaccination and growth and development checks for children, and of courses on nutrition, hygiene and contraception for their mothers. Participation in this part of the programmeme is necessary in order to receive the nutritional supplement. With respect to the education component, subsidies, paid to the mother of the child(ren), are granted conditional on the child(ren) attending at least 80% of school classes. The amounts of the subsidy are 14,000 pesos (US$6.15) and 28,000 pesos (US$12.30) for children attending primary and secondary school, respectively.

• Children’s work: Incidence: (i) in economic activities (income-generating work); (ii) in household chores. Hours worked: (i) in economic activities, (ii) in household chores.
• Education: School enrolment, Hours of school
• Age range: 10-13 years old and 14-17 years old for child work; 8-13 years old and 14-17 years old for education

Difference in difference

Sample: The final evaluation sample is made up of 122 municipalities, out of which 57 are treatment and 65 are controls. For the baseline, around 11,500 households were interviewed, whilst 10,742 households were re-contacted for the follow up, representing around 94% of the original sample. Concerning the households with at least one child in the second survey: early treatment sample size was 7,580; late treatment sample size was 7,077; control sample size was 10,330.
Identification strategy: Random allocation of the programme was not feasible, so for the purpose of the study it was decided to construct a representative stratified sample of treatment municipalities and to choose control municipalities among those that belonged to the same strata but that were excluded from the programme. In each municipality, approximately 100 eligible households were randomly sampled. The impact of the programme is estimated by using a difference-in-differences methodology combined with matching.
Survey instrument: Baseline data collection was conducted between June and October 2002, and follow up data collection between July and November 2003. Given the fact the in some municipalities the programme started before the baseline, the questionnaire included a number of retrospective modules in order to construct ‘pre-programme’ measurements for a large number of variables.

Participation in income-generating work remained largely unaffected by the program. The effects on household chores are largest in the relatively more urbanized parts of rural areas and particularly for younger children, whose participation in household chores decreased by around 13 percentage points after the program, as compared to a decrease of 10 percentage points for older children in these same areas. The program had no discernible impacts on children’s work in more rural areas. The programme increased the school participation rates of children aged 14-17 years by between around 5 and 7 percentage points, to reach enrolment rates of 64% and 82% in rural and urban areas, respectively. It also had non-negligible effects on the enrolment of younger children, of between 1.3 and 2.8 percentage points, despite their already high participation rates in the absence of the programme, to between 91% and 96%. The effects are larger in more urbanized areas, where school attendance goes up by between 3.8 hours per day for older children and 4.5 hours per day for younger children, compared to 1 hour for older rural children and 2.5 hours for younger rural children.

Child Labour

Households

National

Participation in income-generating work remained largely unaffected by the program. The effects on household chores are largest in the relatively more urbanized parts of rural areas and particularly for younger children, whose participation in household chores decreased by around 13 percentage points after the program, as compared to a decrease of 10 percentage points for older children in these same areas. The program had no discernible impacts on children’s work in more rural areas.

The program increased the school participation rates of children aged 14-17 years by between around 5 and 7 percentage points, to reach enrolment rates of 64% and 82% in rural and urban areas, respectively. It also had non-negligible effects on the enrolment of younger children, of between 1.3 and 2.8 percentage points, despite their already high participation rates in the absence of the programme, to between 91% and 96%. The effects are larger in more urbanized areas, where school attendance goes up by between 3.8 hours per day for older children and 4.5 hours per day for younger children, compared to 1 hour for older rural children and 2.5 hours for younger rural children.

Time spent at work (mainly household chores) was reduced by less than the increase in time spent at school. These results suggest that parents are substituting other uses of their children’s time, such as leisure, and are not using the conditional subsidy to replace fully the earnings from their children’s work. The largest substitution effects are observed for children aged 14-17 in urban areas and for children aged 10-13 in rural areas, for whom more than one quarter of the increase in time spent at school comes out of time that would otherwise have been spent on work activities.