We designed a clustered randomised controlled trial to evaluate both interventions. This clustered-RCT was implemented in 128 communities, where a community was defined as an area within a 2-kilometer radius of a primary school. To evaluate the impact of the social norms campaign, half of the communities (64) were randomly assigned to the Social Norms Campaign intervention and the other half (64) to the control group. Within each community, the implementation NGO (BBID) distributed invitations for screenings to all eligible households. To evaluate the mobile based intervention, in 32 of the 64 school catchment areas receiving the Social Norms Campaign, a subset of eligible households that attended the screenings were offered phones with pre-loaded educational apps. The total number of families that were part of this study is approximately 9,300 including one 6-9 year-old child, one sibling and one parent.
To evaluate the treatment effects of this interventions, the research team will use baseline and follow-up surveys that were collected in 2018-2020. Both baseline and follow-up surveys collected (1) from parents/legal guardians, demographic data and standardized measures for aspirations, expectations, self-efficacy and attitudes related to education and (2) from children and siblings, literacy and numeracy tests. Listing and Baseline data were collected in Nov 2018-April 2019, the interventions took place between April-September 2019 and follow-up data collection was split in pre and post-COVID collection (phase 1 - March 2020 and phase 2 September-December 2020). First preliminary results of this intervention will be uploaded in this website by March 2021.
Further details can be found in the AEA RCT Registry.