Long term follow-up of "Schoolgirls not Brides: Secondary Education as a Shield against Child Marriage"

The team is studying the impact of a scholarship-based intervention aimed to foster women's empowerment in Niger. After three years of implementation of the scholarships, school dropout and marriage rates among adolescent girls were two times smaller for treatment girls compared to control girls. However, there is no evidence on whether the scholarships were able to durably transform adolescent girls’ trajectories into adulthood after the program stopped. This project thus aims at measuring the long-term effects of the scholarships on marriage, fertility, and women empowerment. We propose to collect survey data eight years after the implementation -and five years after the end of the scholarships, when participating women will be on average 21 years old. The project will examine whether financial aid for education has the potential to transform women's lives by delaying marriage, reducing the number of children and intimate partner violence, and increasing labor participation, agency, and wellbeing.