Girls’ Education in Burkina Faso
Evaluation Description
The Burkinabé Response to Improve Girls’ Chances to Succeed (BRIGHT) component of Burkina Faso’s two-year Threshold Country Program is designed to increase girls’ primary school enrollment and completion rates via the construction of schools and complementary interventions. The impact evaluation of the program will use a regression discontinuity design to assess the program’s effects on the wellbeing of the beneficiaries, including school enrollment, attendance, food consumption, household livelihood, child care activities by young girls, teacher behaviors, mothers’ educational activities, parent attitudes, and resource allocation within households. The evaluation will estimate the impact of the package of interventions using the 293 communities (or study villages) who applied for the new schools. The Ministry of Education scored each of these communities based on pre-set criteria to identify communities who could benefit most from the schools.
The evaluation compares the 132 “treatment” communities with the higher scores to the 161 communities that were not selected for school construction, statistically accounting for the application score. For more information see the Burkina Faso Country Page.
As part of the subsequent Burkina Faso Compact Program, BRIGHT was scaled up and incorporated into the BRIGHT 2 Schools Project. The impact evaluation will continue as described in Annex III of the compact.
Data Collection
University of Ouagadougou has collected household and school-level data in 10 provinces of Burkina Faso. The data collection team designed one questionnaire to be administered at the household level, focused mainly on school-aged children, and a second questionnaire focused on school attributes and attendance, to be administered to a local school official. A pilot survey was completed in the spring of 2007 and full data collection began in January 2008.
Timeline
