Poster #4 - Cash Transfers and School Completion in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from A Staggered Difference-in-Differences Design

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Despite global efforts to achieve universal education, data from UNESCO shows that school completion remains a significant challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. The region lags other regions in education and economic indicators, such as the out-of-school children rate, school completion rate, and GDP per capita. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of social protection policies by analyzing the impact of cash transfer programs on school completion across 48 sub-Saharan African countries. Accordingly, this study addresses three questions: (1) To what extent do cash transfer programs affect school completion in sub-Saharan Africa? (2) How do these effects differ by gender? and (3) How do they vary across program types (CCTs vs UCTs)?. To answer these questions, I construct a 24-year country-level panel dataset covering 48 sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2023. The analysis combines data from the World Bank’s ASPIRE database on social protection programs with educational and macroeconomic indicators from the World Development Indicators (WDI) and Education Statistics (EdStat). I exploit variation in the timing of program adoption and estimate dynamic treatment effects using an event-study design based on the Gardner two-stage Difference-in-Differences (2SDiD) estimator. The results show that cash transfer programs increase school completion, but effects vary across levels and populations. I find substantial effects on primary and lower-secondary completion rates within 5 years of program adoption. Notably, cash transfers have an immediate (t+1) effect of 9 percentage points on lower secondary completion rates, which increases to around 19 percentage points, five years after program implementation (t+5). Cash transfers also have a significant effect of around 13 percentage points on primary school completion rates five years after program implementation (t+5). In contrast, effects at the upper secondary level are small and statistically insignificant. The analysis also reveals substantial heterogeneity: effects are larger for females than for males, and unconditional cash transfers generate stronger and more consistent gains at the primary and lower secondary levels. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, by contrast, show weaker and less consistent effects across specifications. Overall, the findings point to financial constraints as a central barrier to schooling and highlight the effectiveness of flexible transfer designs in improving educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa.

Author

• Sodiq Abiodun Ambali, University at Albany
  Presenting Author