Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A “Labeled Cash Transfer” for Education

North Africa

Morocco

Social Protection

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT)

N Benhassine et al.

2015

Benhassine, Najy et al. “Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A ‘Labeled Cash Transfer’ for Education.” American Economic Journal. Economic Policy 7.3 (2015): 86–125.
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Codes and datasets are available at Journal’s website.

2015

N. A.

June 2008-June 2010 (baseline and end-line surveys)

The program aimed at testing whether conditionality and granting the transfer to fathers instead of mothers matter for children’s outcomes.

Households with children aged 6–15 in targeted communities.

The program consisted of small transfers, targeted to poor communities (with all households eligible in those communities), and paid out to fathers. The program was unconditional but retained an implicit endorsement of education through its school-based enrollment procedure. It was conducted in over 600 communities and three variants were compared: (i) making the transfer explicitly conditional on regular attendance, (ii) making payments to mothers instead of fathers, and (iii) doing both at the same time.

• Time spent in school, doing homework, going from and to school
• Time spent working at home, outside the home
• School attendance, drop-out (comparison of all treatment arms)

RCT

Study design: the pilot took place in the 5 poorest regions of Morocco (out of 16 administrative regions), and within those regions, in the poorest rural municipalities (administrative units called “communes” in Morocco) with high dropout rates at the primary school level. A total of 320 rural primary school sectors (close to 65 percent of all school sectors in the selected regions) were sampled for the study in those municipalities. Each rural school sector has a well-identified catchment area validated by the provincial-level authority for education policy. A school sector includes a “main” primary school unit and several “satellite” school units (four on average). Satellite units fall under the authority of the headmaster of the main unit and sometimes offer only lower grade classes. Out of the 320 school sectors in the study, 260 were randomly selected to participate in the Tayssir pilot program. These school sectors constitute the treatment group. The other 60 sectors in the sample were selected to constitute the comparison group. The 260 school sectors in the treatment group were subdivided randomly into 4 subgroups, with a two-by-two design: simply labeled as designed to facilitate educational investments (“Tayssir” means facilitation in Arabic) versus conditional on attendance; and father-beneficiary versus mother-beneficiary.
Sample: the final sample had 318 school sectors, with 59 schools in the control group, 40 school sectors in the LCT-to-fathers group, 40 school sectors in the LCT-to-mothers group, and 90 school sectors in the CCT-to-fathers group, and 89 school sectors in the traditional-style CCT-to-mothers group.
Survey Instrument: A detailed survey data for over 4,000 households were used in the study. Four types of data were collected. (i) A measure of school participation through school visits spread over the two years of the program, for all students enrolled in the study schools at the beginning of “year 0” (the academic year 2007–2008) (“school sample”) – over 47,000 students; (ii) A comprehensive survey at both baseline and endline with close to 4,400 households (“household sample”); (iii) A basic arithmetic test (ASER test) to one child per household during the endline household survey. (iv) “Awareness” surveys at and around schools to

measure teachers’ and households’ understanding of the program.

The alternative government-run program of providing a small cash transfer made to fathers of school-aged children in poor rural communities not conditional on school attendance but explicitly labeled as an education support program resulted in large gains in school participation. Adding conditionality and targeting mothers made almost no difference in the context. The program increased parents’ belief that education was a worthwhile investment.

Child Labour

Households

National

Time spent on working on household business/farm/outside for children was reduced after the cash transfer.

The alternative government-run program of providing a small cash transfer made to fathers of school-aged children in poor rural communities not conditional on school attendance but explicitly labeled as an education support program resulted in large gains in school participation. Adding conditionality and targeting mothers made almost no difference in the context. The program increased parents’ belief that education was a worthwhile investment.

The results bring attention to the fact that complex government programs may not always be understood easily; imposing rules (e.g., conditionality) can be lost in implementation. Cash transfer programs may work in part by changing how parents perceive education.