Randomizing Speed School II: Identifying a mechanism for boosting the transfer of children, especially girls, to lower secondary education.

Education is one of society's key strategies to deal with poverty, and fundamental to development and growth. At the individual level, good education opens possibilities for better jobs, higher productivity and a better income. Education is also a right, and there is an intrinsic value to learning. In the Sahel countries, education plays an important role in preventing outcomes that do not only violate children's rights, but also undermine social, democratic and economic development, like early marriage and pregnancy, child labour and trafficking, and support to armed groups. The development objective of this research project was to help strengthen the social, democratic and economic development in the Sahel, by identifying ways to increase the number of children, especially girls, capable of passing the final exam from primary school and transfer to lower secondary education. More precisely, the project set out to develop, test and refine a low-cost mechanism that could provide a second chance to youth who had never started or dropped out of primary school, for one reason or another. The project was implemented in rural Niger, where education rates are particularly low, and the prevalence of early marriages is high. The target group of teenagers, bordering early adulthood, is considered as especially challenging, as opportunity costs to schooling raise with maturity and labour capacity. To target the population of out-of-school youth in the project area, the Norwegian NGO Strømme Foundation implemented an accelerated education program, referred to as Speed School 2 (SS2), targeting 12-14 year-olds. Covering the curriculum of six years of primary school, SS2 was taught over two years. The goal was to refine a mechanism that was low-cost, but still effective enough to be relevant for scaling up in the region. Alongside the SS2 model itself, the research goal of the project was to document its sustainability and relevance. To do that, local implications, effects, and costs had to be carefully understood and assessed. To document the effects and sustainability of the model, the project was piloted within a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. Among 85 communities, 30 were randomly selected for treatment, the rest for control. Listed children within the eligible age-range were randomized into a treatment and control group also within the selected communities. The preliminary results of the RCT show positive and substantial treatment effect from being randomized to the treatment group on attending lower secondary school at endline. They also document improvements in learning, for example in mathematics, and the likelihood that girls in the treatment group were married at endline was significantly reduced, compared to girls in the two control groups. Impact on attitudes and self-esteem is not documented. The estimated per-child costs are moderate, but low for a non-public education program. It should be possible to reduce costs by tailoring supervision and follow-up provision better and by the economy-of-scale effects that will come from increasing the density of the centres. The project structure involved three partners at the operational side and three partners at the research side. At the operational side, Strømme Foundation lead the efforts through its headquarter in Norway, regional offices in Mali, and national office in Niger. In Niger, the NGOs ONEN and CDR implemented the SS2 models, each within their respective region of operation. At the research side, the Norwegian research foundation Fafo partnered with the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) at the Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey (UAM). Fafo also partnered with the Frisch Centre for Economic Research to strengthen the team on the RCT analysis component. ENS is the centre for education science studies in Niger and has actively involved master and PhD students in the data collection and workshops throughout the project period. An indirect effect of the project has therefore been its contribution to knowledge development about rural education challenges and alternative education approaches to help include marginalized children in education among several cohorts of ENS students. The students have through the many rounds of extensive data collection also been trained in survey development and the operation of electronic data collection tools. Research results have been disseminated in a series of events with stakeholders among donors, multilateral organizations and NGOs throughout the project period, both in Niger and Norway. Two major conferences were organized by ENS in Niamey in 2021, involving students, academics and high-level staff from the ministries concerned. The three main articles from the project will in the coming months be presented and discussed at European/US academic conferences on their paths towards final publication. The project was implemented in the period 2017-2021 and has been formally closed.

The development objective of this proposal was to help strengthen the social, democratic and economic development in the Sahel, by identifying ways to increase the number of children, especially girls, capable of passing the final exam from primary school and transfer to lower secondary education. More precisely the project set out to develop, test and refine a low-cost mechanism that could provide a second chance to out-of-school youth. The preliminary results show positive and substantial treatment effect from being randomized to the treatment group on attending lower secondary school at endline. They also document improvements in learning, and the likelihood that girls in the treatment group were married at endline was significantly reduced, compared to the control group. The estimated per-child costs are moderate, but low for a non-public education program. It should be possible to reduce costs by improving supervision and follow-up provision, and by the economy-of-scale effects.

The project targets a crucial bottleneck in the Sahelian education sector: the transfer of children, especially girls, from primary to secondary school. Five million school-aged children are out of school in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Every year, more than 400,000 more drop out, with slim chances of reenrolling. The project aims to refine a low-cost mechanism for reinserting primary school drop-outs into lower secondary. Education is a goal in itself, and for the highly vulnerable group of 13-14-year-old children, schooling may also prevent negative outcomes such as early child bearing, trafficking and radicalization. Delaying the age of first pregnancy is important to several health outcomes, and also targets one of the greatest challenges to economic development in the region: the high population growth. The Speed School II mechanism, suggested in this proposal, builds on the highly successful Speed School I model, currently being scaled up in the region. Yet, it acknowledges the different challenges of working with an older child population. The project will document the results of a 2-year intervention mechanism in a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), covering 30 treatment and 60 control communities. Alongside schooling, the research component will document variation in the prevalence of negative child outcomes. The research adds to the RCT literature by researching a treatment that offers schooling without financial incentives. In existing studies, the impact of transfers is easily confounded with the impact of schooling itself. This has political implications: in very poor economies, transfer programs can be unaffordable, especially when the target group is large. Finally, the tailoring of a successful catch-up mechanism for older out-of-school children is widely applicable also beyond the Sahelian region. Notably, conflict and post-conflict areas around the world face huge out-of-school populations with an urgent need to be reinserted into school.