Ten-Year Impacts of Burkina Faso’s BRIGHT Program

VI. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
MATHEMATICA POLICY RESEARCH
A. Differences in school characteristics
We found that selected villages are more likely to have a school than the unselected villages.
Because BRIGHT was designed to bring schools closer to the children in the targeted villages
and provide better infrastructure and resources, it is not surprising that the selected villages are
more likely to have a school than the unselected villages. But the difference between the two
groups has been shrinking over time. Selected villages were 33 percentage points more likely to
have a school in 2008; that difference dropped to 15 percentage points in 2012, and fell further,
to only 8 percentage points, in 2015.
In addition, there is more evidence suggesting that the quality of educational opportunities
for children in unselected villages has improved substantially over the last 10 years. Ten years
after the start of the intervention, villages selected for BRIGHT still have significantly better
educational infrastructure and resources in terms of classroom quality, teacher accommodations,
having more teachers, and lower student-teacher ratio. But at the same time, schools in
unselected villages are not less likely to have students without desks or dry-ration programs,
which was the case in 2008 and 2012. Also, based on the 2015 data, we no longer find any
significant difference between the selected and unselected villages in the likelihood of schools
being oversubscribed even though schools in selected villages were 19.4 percentage points less
likely to be oversubscribed in 2012.
However, schools in villages selected for BRIGHT have largely sustained the girl-friendly
characteristics that were the focus of the intervention. They are significantly more likely to have
preschools where younger siblings of students can stay while they are at school, have a source
where students can collect water to take home after school, have regular and gender-segregated
toilets, and also have more female teachers. The differences between schools in selected and
unselected villages in terms of these characteristics are generally much larger in 2015 than in
2008, but are smaller than in 2012. We observe larger differences in 2012 and 2015 because
construction of many of these amenities was not completed by 2008 (particularly the preschools,
which were piloted in 2008 among only a small number of schools). It is possible that the
differences decreased after 2012 because the amenities were not maintained properly once the
intervention ended.
To summarize, the differences between selected and unselected villages in terms of school
access and quality decreased over time, as the educational opportunities for children in
unselected villages improved. However, most of the girl-friendly features of selected schools
continued to persist and are plausibly driving factors for the impacts of the program for girls.
B. Impacts of the BRIGHT program
Ten years after the start of the intervention, BRIGHT still had a significant positive
impact—6.0 percentage points for children between ages 6 and 22—on self-reported enrollment.
The impacts are smaller than estimated impacts on enrollment at 7 and 3 years after the start of
the program. The reduced magnitude of impacts over time becomes more apparent when we
compare estimated impacts on enrollment for children of the same age range across the three
evaluations. Specifically, the impact of the program on likelihood of school enrollment among
6- to 12-year-olds was 18.5 percentage points in 2008, 15 percentage points in 2012, and 5.2
percentage points in 2015.
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