In Sub-Saharan Africa, young girls drop out of school at higher rates than boys. A large portion of drop outs occur between primary and secondary school, when families in most countries have to start paying fees for their children to continue attending school. In Zambia, researchers designed and evaluated the impact of a training that taught adolescent girls non-cognitive skills to negotiate health and educational decisions with authority figures in their lives. They found that girls who were taught negotiation skills had better educational outcomes in the following three years. The negotiation training appeared to have larger effects on girls with higher abilities.

Social programs in developing countries are often plagued by corruption, especially within the flow of funds from the central government to beneficiaries. For the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in India, the central government disburses funds to local governments based on projected spending. In Bihar, researchers tested the effect of an information technology reform that linked the flow of funds to actual expenditures and reduced the number of officials involved in the process. The reform reduced program expenditures by 24 percent without a concurrent decrease in MGNREGS employment or wages received, suggesting that increased transparency reduced leakage. These results led to a national scale-up of the fund-flow model, with sustained effects.