Anticipatory Human Capital Investment
RCTReview
Parents in developing economies underinvest in young girls' education and health because they perceive low labor market returns for educated women compared to men, perpetuating severe gender gaps in schooling and child nutrition [1, 9].
Picture this
Imagine a gardener who only waters tomato plants because he believes cucumber plants will never bear valuable fruit at market. Once the gardener learns that cucumber prices have surged, he immediately begins watering and fertilizing the young cucumber sprouts so they grow strong and yield high returns later [9].
What the evidence says
Girls aged 6 to 17 in treatment villages were 5 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school, closing 60 percent of the baseline boy-girl enrollment gap; treatment girls also gained significant BMI, closing 30 to 40 percent of the BMI gap relative to wealthy Delhi residents, while no changes occurred for boys [10].
- Who was studied
- Random sample of 3,200 households across 160 rural villages in four North Indian states (Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh); tracked school-aged children aged 6 to 17 [6, 7].
- How
- Three-year cluster RCT providing village-level recruitment information sessions for female BPO jobs; school enrollment was verified by contacting schools directly, and body mass index (BMI) was physically measured [4, 5, 7].
What to do
Provide salient evidence of future high-return economic opportunities for educated females to parents and communities to stimulate early-childhood health and educational investments in young girls [9].
From the source
"Girls aged 6 to 17 at the end of intervention were 5 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school in treatment villages than in comparison villages. These gains closed about 60 percent of the boy-girl gap in enrollment, as measured at the start of the intervention." [10]
Improving_Labor_Market_Opportunities_to_Increase_Womens_Employment.pdf