Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in the Gambia

By Moussa P. Blimpo, O. Gajigo, Todd Pugatch. Social Science Research Network, 2016

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study analyzes the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by 55 percent. The share of older test takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the quantity and composition of students, there are robustly positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a setting where expanded access could strain limited resources and reduce school quality. The findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in low-income countries like The Gambia.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dd0b9b93cfdcc5d75bbb93f5bb9e8b88053518e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Education

Stefanie Stantcheva

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Free Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana (2021, unknown): “Blimpo et al. (2019) find that secondary school fees elimination increased girls’ enrollment by 55%. for the BECE exam score, though all our results are robust to the inclusion of additional baseline controls.”
Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications (2019, background): “Using variation in wealth taxation across Swiss cantons, Brülhart et al. (2019) also find large taxable wealth responses.”