Ten-Year Impacts of Burkina Faso’s BRIGHT Program

V. COST-EFFECTIVENESS AND COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS MATHEMATICA POLICY RESEARCH
The cost-effectiveness of the program is the effects divided by the costs—the benefits
presented in panel B divided by panel A. The benefits in panel B show, for selected and
unselected villages, the estimated number of children attending school in 2015 as well as the
average test scores of all children in each village. Using enrollment as an example, 106 children
attended school in an average selected village, whereas only 90 children attended in an average
unselected village. The difference, 17 children, is the number of children attending school due to
the village being assigned to BRIGHT. Dividing the 17 children by the difference in cost
estimates from panel A yields cost-effectiveness estimates of $245.78 per child-year of
enrollment for the high-cost scenario and $357.31 for the low-cost scenario. The same estimates
for test scores are $46.57 and $67.70, respectively, to increase an average children’s test scores
by one-tenth of a standard deviation.
Although there are limitations with the technique, described in Section A, with the costeffectiveness
estimates we can compare the effectiveness of the BRIGHT program to other
interventions focused on enrollment and test scores. Compared to other programs that seek to
enroll children through creating new schools, BRIGHT is less cost-effective due to both
differences in treatment effects and estimated costs. However, there are only two such studies
currently in the literature. Burde and Linden (2013) evaluate a community-based school program
in Afghanistan that enrolls children for $38.55 a year and improves test scores by one-tenth of a
standard deviation for $4.32. Duflo (2001) evaluates a large-scale school construction program in
Indonesia that enrolls children for $81.60 a year, but the researcher does not assess the effects on
test scores.
We can also compare BRIGHT to other programs that seek to improve enrollment and
learning through other means. However, an important caveat must be raised. Most of these other
programs are “add-on” programs, in that they are predicated on the existence of a school in
which to enroll children. This might make them more cost-effective. Despite this limitation,
BRIGHT is more cost-effective than many programs, even though it is at the upper range in
terms of cost. It is a more cost-effective strategy for improving enrollment than conditional cash
transfers and girls’ scholarships. In terms of improving learning, the existing research suggests
that conditional cash transfers have few effects. There are approaches, including extra teachers,
role models, uniforms, and computer-assisted learning, that are more cost-effective for either
outcome. A full list can be found in Tables D.7 and D.8 in Appendix D.
C. Benefit-cost analysis for the BRIGHT program
Next, we conduct the benefit-cost analysis. As described in the next paragraph, it requires a
number of assumptions, many of which are quite strong. In the analysis that follows, we make
the following assumptions that are summarized in Table V.6:
1. We assume that with the five-year maintenance, BRIGHT schools have a life span of
40 years; to account for the lower quality of the traditional government schools, we assume
that those schools last 30 years. Although the schools may be renovated to extend their
lifetimes past this limit, we assume that the value of the initial investment will have
depreciated. The main implication of this assumption is that we assess costs only during this
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