- Designing cost-effective cash transfer programs to boost schooling among young women in Sub-Saharan Africa by Sarah Baird, Craig McIntosh and Berk Ozler. World Bank publication. 2009/10/01
- The short-term impacts of a schooling conditional cash transfer program on the sexual behavior of young women by Sarah Baird, Ephraim Chirwa, and Craig McIntosh. World Bank publication. 2009/10/01
Amber wrote:
Two papers from a fairly "cutting edge" intervention for schooling and HIV risk among adolescent girls in the Zomba area run by the World Bank. The project gives the equivalent of 10 USD plus school fees to adolescent girls conditional on school attendance. The findings are encouraging, and although there are many many conditional cash transfer projects running in Latin America/elsewhere, this is the first rigorously evaluated that 1) randomizes conditional requirements (attendance rates) and 2) gives cash directly to girls and 3) focuses on HIV prevention as an explicit outcome. This research is fairly high profile and has potential to influence other similar projects being designed and evaluated--for example in South Africa and Yemen by the Bank and partner organizations.
She added that:
Of course, as always, there are people who have issues with this kind of experiment -- namely, how sustainable or what is the scale up potential for this kind of project versus say a school quality improvement. But, good that we are getting some results like this anyway.
Of course, as always, there are people who have issues with this kind of experiment -- namely, how sustainable or what is the scale up potential for this kind of project versus say a school quality improvement. But, good that we are getting some results like this anyway.
Thank you, Amber!
The cash transfer project is a great idea to keep girls in school and stop them from getting HIV. My only reservation is exactly what Amber wrote in her last paragraph: it is an experiment. I don't know what mentality/culture the supposedly free money is creating among the benefiting girls - is it teaching them independence or would they grow up expecting to receive free things all the time? And if they grow up to realize life is not free anymore and God forbid they didn't succeed in school, won't this expose them further to the virus if they started selling their bodies for money? I would like to see interventions that empower people and their communities to address their own problems.
ReplyDeleteI just don't believe that pouring money into Malawi (and Africa in general) for HIV/AIDS projects is the panacea for getting people healthy. Which brings me to an article I read which argues that AIDS is not the #1 killer in Malawi - malaria and other preventable diseases are (the paper is available here: http://www.allacademic.com/one/www/www/index.php?cmd=www_search&offset=0&limit=5&multi_search_search_mode=publication&multi_search_publication_fulltext_mod=fulltext&textfield_submit=true&search_module=multi_search&search=Search&search_field=title_idx&fulltext_search=The+Global+Response+to+AIDS+in+Africa%3A+the+Dangerous+Effects+of+Good+Intentions). It's amazing that every NGO in Malawi is working on AIDS while very few are working on malaria, which claims more lives every year. I hope people can talk about these things too.
Keep up the good work!