The medium-term impact of the primary education stipend in rural Bangladesh.
Abstract
This brief focuses on the medium-term impact of Bangladesh’s major, primary-level cash-for-education program. This study focused on determining (1) the long-term impacts of educational transfers on per capita consumption and gender-disaggregated measures of monetary and nonmonetary well-being; (2) the impact of educational transfers on physical and human capital accumulation; and (3) the underlying processes—at household, community, and national levels—that contributed to the success or failure of the transfers. The study concluded that the PES program shows few signs of improving school enrollments, household expenditures, or calorie or protein consumption and recommended that the program’s targeting mechanisms should be review, giving consideration, in particular, as to whether it would be more efficient to target larger cash transfers to smaller numbers of the poorest households.
Citation
IFPRI, Washington, USA/CPRC, Manchester, UK, 4 pp.