Research

Significant resources are allocated to targeted aid projects aimed at enhancing the socio-economic well-being of participants. Evaluating these projects is both time-consuming and costly. A major difficulty in these evaluations is identifying an adequate control group to accurately measure the treatment effects of the aid projects. We propose a cost-effective method for selecting a control group that can serve as a baseline for post-project evaluations. Specifically, we explore the feasibility of using existing secondary data sources, such as household surveys, to establish a control group that mirrors the treatment group in evaluation analyses based on interviews. We validate our approach using data from an educational programme in rural Ghana that targeted marginalized, out-of-school adolescent women. This setting exemplifies a highly specific aid intervention, common in many small-scale development initiatives. Our findings highlight the critical role of considering the project’s selection criteria when constructing a control group from existing secondary data. Furthermore, we emphasize the necessity of ensuring that survey questions administered to the treatment group match those used in the secondary data source to maintain comparability in evaluation analyses.

Over the past decade, a substantial body of research has emerged leveraging large-scale educational policy reforms in Africa - so-called Free Primary Education (FPE) policies - to examine the causal effect of education on women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Yet, reported effects are generally small and vary sufficiently such that zero mean effects cannot be ruled out. Importantly, part of this variability may reflect differences in sample construction and specification choices across studies, despite a strong concentration on only a small number of FPE countries. This paper offers a systematic, harmonised, and continent-wide quantitative evaluation of FPE-induced education on women’s SRH. Pooling all available Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from all countries that have ever implemented FPE, we employ best-practice, data-driven regression discontinuity designs (RDD) that generate robust estimates while minimising researcher discretion. Our results challenge the assumption of a uniform causal return to schooling for SRH. While FPE policies increased educational attainment and literacy in many cases - though not universally - they did not lead to improvements in women’s SRH outcomes on average. We find evidence of improvements only under specific conditions, particularly in settings characterised by very low baseline education and high prevailing fertility rates. We conclude that the abolition of school fees alone may be insufficient to generate equitable gains in schooling and to improve women’s reproductive health without complementary institutional conditions and supply-side investments.

Child marriage remains a widespread practice globally that disproportionately constrains girls’ life trajectories, with adverse consequences for human capital accumulation, fertility behaviour, labour market participation, and exposure to intimate partner violence. Despite a growing number of countries adopting child marriage bans (CMBs) setting 18 as the minimum legal marriage age, substantial variation in enforcement and legal exemptions raise concerns about their effectiveness. Despite the policy prominence of CMBs, rigorous causal evidence on their effects on women’s long-term outcomes remains limited. This paper evaluates the effects of CMBs on marital timing and a range of women’s life-cycle outcomes, with particular attention to heterogeneity across individual characteristics and institutional environments. I exploit staggered policy adoption across countries in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that leverages discontinuities in birth-cohort eligibility. Defining CMBs as laws establishing a minimum marriage age of 18 without parental-consent exceptions, I combine policy data from the WORLD Policy Analysis Center with individual-level Demographic and Health Surveys. The final sample includes 26 countries that implemented such reforms between 1995 and 2023. Results show that CMBs reduce the likelihood of early marriage, though effects are modest, consistent with imperfect compliance and uneven enforcement. Instrumental variable estimates further indicate that delayed marriage reduces fertility and adolescent childbearing while increasing labour market participation. Effects are heterogeneous, being strongest among younger cohorts and in contexts with high pre-reform adolescent fertility and low baseline child marriage prevalence. Overall, the findings highlight that while legal reforms can shift marriage timing and improve outcomes, their effectiveness depends critically on enforcement capacity and local demographic conditions.