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Stemming girls’ chronic poverty: Catalysing development change by building just social institutions
on health, education and nutrition, often with particularly
valuable impacts for girls. In South Africa, for instance, girls
in pension-recipient households are on average 3 to 4 cm taller
than girls in non-recipient households (Duflo, 2000, in Palacios
and Sluchynsky, 2006).
Improving girls’ human capital development
opportunities
In order to minimise the negative effects of son bias on girls’
experiences of poverty and vulnerability, policy approaches
which improve their human capital development opportunities
are also essential. We consider three broad categories: reducing
opportunity costs of girls’ schooling; enhancing capacity
building and training opportunities for adolescent girls; and
social health protection. First, there is a growing range of
promising policy initiatives that aim to reduce the opportunity
costs poor families face in investing in girls’ education. Glick
(2008) argues that two types of policies could improve girls’
educational access: ‘those that are “gender neutral,” that
is, that do not specifically target female (or male) schooling
returns or costs; and those that are gender-targeted, that is,
that attempt to alter the costs or benefits of girls’ schooling
relative to boys.’ In the first case, demand for girls’ schooling
is often more responsive than boys’ to gender-neutral changes
in school distance, price and quality, which can be explained
by perceptions about differential costs and returns of girls’ and
boys’ schooling. Increasing the availability of local schooling to
reduce distances travelled and demand-side interventions that
subsidise households’ schooling costs, such as cash transfer
programmes and school feeding programmes, are other good
examples (see Box 21).
In some contexts, however, where gender imbalances are
significant and/or cultural barriers are strong, approaches
which directly target girls’ schooling can be more expedient.
Glick (2008) notes robust evaluation evidence that households
respond to incentives in the form of subsidies for enrolling
girls (see also Chapter 1 on Discriminatory Family Codes).
India’s Balika Samridhi Yojana programme, which is designed
to change attitudes towards the girl child at birth, improve
enrolment and retention at school, raise the age of marriage
and assist girls to undertake income-generating activities, is
one such case. The government makes ‘periodical deposits’
of money for the first two girls in a family from birth until
the age of 18, with payments conditional on school attendance
and remaining unmarried. The scheme was redesigned in
1999 to 2000 to ensure that the dividend went directly to the
girl child (Ramesh, 2008). Other promising initiatives on the
supply side which are supported by randomised programme
evaluation evidence include financial incentives to teachers
and school managers to attract or retain female students (Glick,
2008). Informal assessments also suggest that the provision
Box 21: Strengthening demand for education
Cash for education approaches reduce the cost of sending children to school by providing additional income to the family and
offsetting losses if school replaces paid work for a child. In the case of conditional cash transfers –
those programmes that make
participation dependent on compliance with the use of basic services for children – they may also increase the benefits of attending
school and reduce health and nutrition constraints. The earliest and most famous cash transfer programme is Mexico’s Oportunidades
(‘Opportunities’), initiated in 1995, which now reaches 25 million low-income Mexicans (World Bank, 2008). Oportunidades offers a
higher monthly cash transfer to support girls’ secondary education and has been shown to increase secondary school enrolments by 20
percent for girls and 10 percent for boys (Adelman et al., 2008). In the case of Brazil’s Bolsa Família (‘Family Grant’), a similar initiative
reaching 12.4 million households, aggregate school attendance by boys and girls has risen by 4.4 percentage points (ibid). The largest
gains have occurred in the historically disadvantaged northeast, where enrolments have risen by 11.7 percentage points. Importantly,
children and especially girls aged 15 to 17 who are at greatest risk of dropping out are more likely to progress from one grade to the
next. Bolsa Família increases the likelihood that a 15-year-old girl will remain in school by 19 percentage points.
School feeding programmes are another important demand-side approach: although there is insufficient evidence that they address
malnutrition, they have the potential to improve school participation and learning outcomes through the consumption of nutritious
food (Adelman et al., 2008). In World Food Programme (WFP)-assisted schools, there is on average only a very small gender gap (78
percent boys’ to 76 percent girls’ net enrolment rate). In cases where there are significant gaps in access to and completion of basic
education, WFP programmes include take home rations for girls which are conditional on their attendance rate. These can contribute
to increasing enrolment rates: for example, in Pakistan the provision of take home rations to girls attending school for at least 20 days
a month resulted in a 135 percent increase in enrolment between 1998 to 1999 and 2003 to 2004 (WFP, 2010). In Afghanistan, WFP
helped to increase girls’ enrolment and attendance rates by distributing a monthly ration of 3.7 litres of vegetable oil (an important
component of the local diet) to girls, conditional on a minimum attendance of 22 days per month (ibid). In India, which has a long
history of school feeding programmes (since 1925), a 2001 Supreme Court ruling declared a constitutional right to food, and school
feeding programmes now feed approximately 120 million girls each day (Winch, 2009). This has been found to be especially effective in
improving school enrolment, especially among girls (WFP, 2010).