their scholarship status. Note that girls applied for the scholarship in 6<sup>th</sup> grade, during the 2002/2003 school year, scholarships were first awarded during the 2003/04 school year, and school visits took place during the course of the 2004/05 school year. During the school visit, enumerators checked 8<sup>th</sup> grade enrollment rosters and physically verified whether or not a girl was attending an 8<sup>th</sup> grade class on the day of the visit.

On the basis of the school visits, we construct three measures of enrollment and attendance. The first is a dummy variable that takes on the value of one if the girl in question was enrolled in 8<sup>th</sup> grade at the JFPR school she had applied to. Note that a girl would only figure as enrolled by this measure if she enrolled in the school she applied to in two consecutive years, and did not repeat a grade. The second measure is physically verified attendance, a dummy variable that takes on the value of one if a girl was present in an 8<sup>th</sup> grade class at the time of the visit by the enumerators. This variable depends on enrollment; attendance, conditional on enrollment; and adequate grade progress in a JFPR school. The third variable is a dummy variable that takes on the value of one if a girl is enrolled at any school, regardless whether this is a JFPR school or not. To construct this third variable, we proceeded as follows. When an applicant to a given JFPR school did not appear on the 8<sup>th</sup> grade enrollment rosters, enumerators asked other 8<sup>th</sup> grade students in that school whether they knew the missing girl. If someone knew the girl in question, they were asked whether they knew she was definitely enrolled elsewhere; definitely not enrolled; or whether respondents were not certain about the enrollment status of the missing girl. On the basis of the enrollment registers and the questions asked of 8<sup>th</sup> grade girls during the school visits, we were able to establish the enrollment status of 95.2 percent of all of the girls who had completed scholarship applications. One way to think of the girls whose enrollment status could not be established is as attritors out of the sample. The attrition rate, 4.8 percent, is low—as a point of comparison, attrition in a recent evaluation of school voucher scheme in Colombia was almost 50 percent (Angrist et al. 2002). Nevertheless, we carefully consider the extent to which selective attrition could bias our estimates of program impact.

Table 1 compares enrollment, attendance, and the characteristics of girls who were awarded scholarships and those who were not. The table shows that, on average, scholarship recipients had significantly lower socioeconomic status than non-recipients: Recipients had parents with lower education levels; they were more likely to live in a hut or a house with an earthen floor, and less likely to have houses made of high-grade materials like cement, brick, tiles, metal or fibre; recipients were also less likely to own any one of a number of means of transportation, less likely to own more than a hectare of land, less likely to regularly lend money, and more likely to have debts. These results confirm that the LMCs were successful at targeting scholarships to girls with lower socioeconomic status. Table 1 also shows that 86.7 percent of recipients, but only 64.6 percent of non-recipients were enrolled in a JFPR 5