Beyond Attendance: Gendered Impacts of a Cash Transfer for Education and the Unpaid Care Burden in Rural Morocco 1 Luca Maria Pesando Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania Running title : Cash transfer, gender, and unpaid care work Name : Luca Maria Surname : Pesando Affiliation : Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania Address : 249 McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, 19104, PA, USA Email : lucapes@sas.upenn.edu Phone : +1.215.917.7764 1 The author is grateful to Kate Schwartz, Jere R. Behrman, Hans-Peter Kohler, Julia A. Behrman, Yeshim Iqbal, Michel Guillot, J. Lawrence Aber, and Sharon Wolf for helpful feedback and discussions. I am also grateful for useful comments from seminar participants at the 2016 Population Association of America (PAA) and the “Young Lives” Conference on Adolescence, Youth, and Gender, held at the University of Oxford. Funding: This work was partially supported by a research fellowship awarded by Global TIES for Children at New York University and funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation [grant number 2014- 9621]. The author further acknowledges the financial support of the Fulbright Commission and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. 1
Abstract This paper explores the effect of an education-oriented cash transfer on school progression and unpaid care work in rural Morocco, including analyses of how effects vary by gender and time spent on unpaid care work prior to intervention implementation. Results suggest that the intervention increased the likelihood of girls progressing through grades on time by approximately 5.5 percentage points, while it had no discernible effect for boys. Yet the benefit of the treatment on timely grade progression was halved for girls engaged in unpaid care tasks, and the transfer proved ineffective in lessening the care burden. Taken together, findings suggest that as a result of the intervention girls performing unpaid care work were staying in school more but were less likely to progress on time. Insights from this research shed light on whether promoting gender equitable opportunities within the household might enable children to follow a more regular school path. Keywords : Randomized experiment; School progression; Gender; Time use; Unpaid care work; Morocco JEL classification: D13, I24, I25, J16, J22 2
Introduction Considerable academic research focuses on the socio-economic factors that predict school enrolment and attainment in both developed and developing countries. More often neglected in the scholarly debate is research delving into the factors that prevent children from progressing through grades in a timely fashion. The costs of age-grade distortions – an umbrella term that accounts for both delayed school entry and grade repetition – are very high, particularly for developing countries, where retention rates are high (Schiefelbein and Wolff 1992; Gomes-Neto and Hanushek 1994; Patrinos and Psacharopoulos 1996). Estimates for Brazil reveal that the costs of grade repetition alone represent an amount equivalent to the entire federal government contribution to first-level schooling (UNESCO 2012). Costs incurred by students in terms of lost opportunities and wasted human capital are even more significant (Manacorda 2012). A factor that may significantly relate to the risk of not progressing through school is the amount of time children devote to unpaid care work within the household (Siddiqui and Iram 2007; El-Kogali and Krafft 2015). Household c hores affect children’ s opportunities to learn and thrive by taking away valuable time they could spend on their education. The situation tends to be worse for girls, and somewhat exacerbated in rural settings characterized by high poverty rates, weak infrastructure, poor school quality, and large family sizes (Patrinos and Psacharopoulos 1997; Gupta 2015). For instance, data from Guatemala show that an increase in the number of younger siblings does not affect time devoted to domestic work for boys, while it brings about an additional four hours per week for girls (Dammert 2009b). Large family size implies increased responsibilities for girls, more time spent on rearing children, cooking meals, washing clothes, caring for sick relatives, etc. The implications of this 3
unequal care burden extend beyond resource-deprived households in low-income contexts. Women of all ages across all world regions suffer from the burden of unpaid care responsibilities, with particularly stark imbalances in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – the geographical focus of this paper – where the female-to-male ratio of time devoted to unpaid care responsibilities approaches seven (Ferrant, Pesando, and Nowacka 2014). Using data from a randomized cash-transfer interventi on (“Tayssir”) implemented in rural Morocco between 2007 and 2010, this paper aims to shed new light on the interplay between household inequality, as driven by gender and unpaid care work dynamics, and children’ s schooling. Specifically, I assess the impact of the cash transfer on school progression outcomes, allowing for treatment effect heterogeneity along socio-demographic lines such as the gender of the child and the amount of time spent on unpaid care work prior to intervention implementation. As unpaid care work emerges as a strong negative predictor of school progression, the analysis concludes with an examination of whether the cash transfer had any effect on lessening the care burden itself. This work capitalizes on previous research from Benhassine et al. (2015), 2 who first evaluated Tayssir documenting positive and significant impacts of the program on school enrolment and attendance. My study builds on the premise that extending the focus to school progression outcomes is key for several reasons. First, enrolment and attendance do not 2 Benhassine, N., F. Devoto, E. Duflo, P. Dupas, and V. Pouliquen. 2015. "Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A 'Labeled Cash Transfer' for Education." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 7, no. 3: 86-125. 4
necessarily translate into learning gains and progression through grades, which hinge upon critical supply- side factors such as school infrastructure, classroom structure, teachers’ quality, and grade repetition policies. 3 Second, there is evidence that school progression is a key determinant of subsequent educational outcomes such as school completion (Jacob and Lefgren 2009; Glick and Sahn 2010). Therefore, in a study that spans a two-year intervention period, school progression matters to the extent that it captures children who are in school but are exposed to the risk of not completing primary or secondary education at a subsequent point in time. This is relevant in the Moroccan context, where large percentages of youth enroll in school without completing primary education (Benhassine et al. 2015). Third, when studied in conjunction with intra-household dynamics such as the unequal allocation of unpaid care tasks, a specific focus on school progression may unravel interesting patterns. For instance, competing time demands might not be so high as to prevent children from going to school, while they can interfere with children’ s smooth progression by taking away valuable time they could devote to out-of-school study time. Girls in low-income contexts – such as rural settings in MENA countries – are often at higher risk of not completing primary education due to rooted traditions and moral and religious beliefs that perpetuate gender inequalities since young ages. These inequalities affect the role girls play within the household, the distribution of activities, and the amount of time 3 While this idea has been acknowledged globally with the shift from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), targeting “education for all”, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), stressing the value of “quality education”, few scholars evaluating educational interventions embed this component in their analyses. 5
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