Second, interventions that reduce the cost of education and increase access to schools, are generally assumed to lower the incidence of child labor. Along with the construction of girlfriendly schools, the Burkinabé Response to Improve Girls’ Chances to Succeed (BRIGHT) provided school kits, textbooks and school meals for all students in 132 rural villages in rural Burkina Faso. Female pupils were also eligible for take-home rations on the condition that they attended school regularly. Regression discontinuity estimates based on the assignment score for village eligibility to participate in the program show that BRIGHT let to strong improvements in school enrollment and children’s scores in mathematics and French tests (Kazianga et al 2014). Kazianga et al (2014) and De Hoop and Rosati (2014) show that there was no effect of the program on activities performed by the child outside the household<sup>17</sup> . When disaggregated by gender, there is not much difference in the treatment effect (Kazianga et al 2014) but boys without female siblings (who did not benefit indirectly from the take-home rations provided to girls) appear to have increased their participation in work outside and inside their households, possibly because the increased school access reduced the time they spent commuting to school (De Hoop and Rosati 2014).

# **3.6 Targeted Child Labor Programs**

In the previous sections, we have reviewed several policies that affect child indirectly but what about programs and policies that target child labor directly? The International Labor Organization (ILO), UNICEF, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), among others have implemented a variety of policies and programs towards working children. While these programs are informative and have been implemented all over the developing world, there has been few rigorous evaluations of these programs. Thus, we will review them with caution with the purpose of informing policy design and highlighting gaps in the literature.<sup>18</sup> One of the most common type of policies implemented to reduce child labor is advocacy. The main idea is to inform parents, employers, children, and policy makers about the potential negative effects of children’s engagement in some types of economic activities and household chores. The assumption is that parents/employers may not have full information about the harmful effects of some types of activities, in particular, the worst forms of child labor. The ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) has focused on raising awareness on child labor and the implementation of legal and policy frameworks in more than 200 projects worldwide (ILO 2015). Examples include awareness campaigns on child labor in the tourism sector in Cape Verde, cocoa farming in Ghana, and domestic work for pay outside the household in Ecuador (ILO 2015). Similarly, UNICEF has worked to raise awareness about child labor, for example through a Parenting Education Initiative in Nepal, where the goal is to increase parents’ awareness of the harmful effects of child labor (UNICEF 2011).

> 17 There is a discrepancy in the results in regards to household chores driven by different specifications of the econometric model.

> 18  In January of 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs awarded $11 million in grants for monitoring and impact evaluation studies on child labor. Results will be available in 2019. <u>(http://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ilab/ilab20150067 accessed on April 6th, 2016)</u>

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