96 CHAPTER 6


again. For children ages six through ten, the program was associated with less grade repetition and better grade progression (Behrman, Sengupta, and Todd 2001). The program was also associated with a reduction in child labor. For boys ages eight to seventeen, there was a reduction in the probability of working of about 10–14 percent, even higher for ages twelve to fifteen. Girls ages eight to seventeen also had about a 15 percent reduction in the proba- bility of working. The program had no impact for boys or girls ages sixteen to seventeen, however (Parker and Skoufias 2000). PROGRESA had very little impact on school attendance, on achievement as measured by cognitive achievement test scores, and on bringing children back to school who had dropped out (it brought them back initially, but they tended to drop out again after a year) (Behrman, Sengupta, and Todd 2000, 2001). PROGRESA turned into Oportunidades in 2001, and a subsequent evalua- tion found a 24 percent increase in secondary school enrollment in rural areas and 4 percent in urban areas. The effects were again stronger for girls than for boys, and almost twice as great for girls in urban areas. The program is credited with increasing the number of girls enrolled in rural secondary school from 83 to every hundred boys enrolled to 96 per hundred boys (Parker 2004).


Nicaragua Nicaragua’s Red de Protección Social (RPS) provided a cash transfer condi- tioned on primary school (not secondary school) enrollment and attendance. The IFPRI evaluation was of a pilot program in two rural “departments” that started in 2000 and expanded in 2002.6 Primary school enrollment was low at baseline, 72 percent. The enrollment impacts were huge: for program par- ticipants, enrollment increased by about 20 percentage points by 2002. How- ever, the rate for the control groups also rose by 7.6 percentage points, so that the net program impact was 12.8 percentage points. This control group increase was greater than the national rural average and appears to have been the net effect of several factors possibly “contaminating” the controls, including (1) increases in school feeding in the area, (2) possible crowding out at the school level, (3) improvements in supply as a result of the program, and (4) likely changes in expectations in the control group, where some hoped that school attendance might hasten their incorporation into the program. The impacts were greatest for the extreme poor, at 25 percentage points versus 14 points for the poor and 6 percent for the nonpoor (although there were few nonpoor in the sample). There was no significant difference between the impacts on girls and on boys, an outcome expected more at the primary than at the secondary level (Maluccio and Flores 2005).


6In 2004, some 21,619 families were enrolled in the program, but the program has since been cancelled.


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