Ten-Year Impacts of Burkina Faso’s BRIGHT Program

IV: FINDINGS
MATHEMATICA POLICY RESEARCH
D. Impacts on child labor
Children who attend school are unable to engage in other activities during the time that they
are in class or studying. One of the main opportunity costs is work that the child might otherwise
do for pay or for the family. The 3-year impact evaluation as well as the 7-year impact evaluation
found modest reductions in children’s work (Kazianga et al. 2013, Kazianga et al. 2016). 31 We
assess the impacts of the program using the current data set on the same set of outcomes, and
present the results in Table IV.4.
The program no longer had any impact on the number of children engaged in labor
activities in the past week. Unlike the results observed in the 3-year and 7-year impact
evaluations, we did not find any significant differences in participation in any of the children’s
labor activities (Table IV.4, panel A), including a standardized composite work index. 32 The
change is not simply due to aging; the results are similar when we use only children in the same
age group as the 2012 evaluation (6- to 17-years-old). For the 10-year impact evaluation, we also
investigated the impacts on the hours children engaged in labor activities. Children in both
selected and unselected villages spent the most amount of time in fetching water—about 4
hours—and tending animal—about 3 and a half hours—in the week before the survey, but they
also spent 1 to 2 hours in other household labor activities. However, we found no significant
impacts of the BRIGHT program on time spent on child labor activities as well (Table IV.4,
panel B).
There are two reasons that may have contributed to the lack of impacts on child labor. First,
the smaller impact on enrollment in the current data has likely resulted in a smaller difference
between the selected and the unselected villages in the number of children engaged in labor
activities. Second, the drop in the impact of BRIGHT may also be the result of broader societal
changes in the way child labor is viewed. There was a decline in participation across all of the
labor activities from 2012 to 2015 in both selected and unselected villages, more so in unselected
villages (for example, percentage engaged in collecting firewood declined by 3.5 and 8.7
percentage points from 2012 to 2015 in selected and unselected villages, respectively). This may
have resulted from the recent efforts by the Government of Burkina Faso to reduce the
prevalence of child labor in Burkina Faso (Bureau of International Labor Affairs 2015). It is
possible that the efforts were more concentrated in the unselected villages because of the higher
prevalence of child labor in those area as was seen in the 3-year and 7-year impact evaluation.
31
It should be noted that de Hoop and Rosati (2012) find conflicting results using the same data, arguing that the
program actually increased children’s work in some specifications.
32
The composite work index is constructed in two steps. First, we take the sum of seven binary variables that appear
as one if the child had: collected firewood, cleaned, fetched water, cared for siblings, tended animals, shopped, or
done other family work in the previous week. Second, we standardized the sum to express the work index in
standard deviations. Only chores that at least 10 percent of children participated in are included.
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