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 global practice that disproportionately constrains the life trajectories of girls, with adverse consequences for human capital accumulation, fertility behaviour, labour market participation, and exposure to intimate partner violence. In recent decades, a growing number of countries have introduced child marriage bans (CMBs) that establish 18 as the minimum legal age of marriage. However, substantial variation in enforcement and persistent legal exemptions raise concerns about the extent to which such reforms translate into meaningful behavioural change. Despite the policy prominence of CMBs, rigorous causal evidence on their effectiveness 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 contexts and cohorts. I exploit staggered reform implementation across countries and employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that leverages discontinuities in birth-cohort eligibility. Combining CMB data from the WORLD Policy Analysis Center with individual-level Demographic and Health Surveys, I define a CMB as a policy setting the minimum legal marriage age at 18 without exceptions based on parental consent. This yields a final sample of 26 countries that implemented such reforms between 1995 and 2023. The findings indicate that CMBs lead to a statistically significant, though modest, decline in the likelihood of early marriage, consistent with imperfect compliance and uneven enforcement. Instrumental variable estimates further reveal that CMB-driven delays in marriage lead to substantial reductions in fertility, lower rates of adolescent childbearing, and modest increases in labour market participation. Beyond these average effects, the analysis reveals considerable heterogeneity. The effects are most pronounced for younger cohorts, in settings characterised by high baseline pre-reform adolescent fertility, and in regions with low pre-reform child marriage prevalence. These results suggest that while CMBs can effectively alter marriage timing among affected groups, their broader socioeconomic consequences, however, are shaped by the institutional environments in which they are implemented. More broadly, the findings underscore the importance of enforcement capacity and local demographic conditions in determining whether reforms translate into meaningful improvements in women’s life opportunities.