# **1. Introduction**

Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. In a large number of countries, especially in the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa, overall education for girls is low, and lags significantly behind that of boys. Nonetheless, over 180 governments have adopted universal primary education and gender parity in schooling as Millennium Development Goals. These commitments notwithstanding, there is surprisingly little evidence on policies and programs that effectively raise school attainment, including for girls (see the reviews by Glewwe 2002; Case 2004).

In this paper we evaluate the impact of a program designed to increase the enrollment of girls in secondary school in Cambodia. Cambodia is recovering from many years of internal and external strife. The Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and Vietnamese occupation in the 1980s had severe repercussions for all aspects of the economy and society, including the education sector (see De Walque 2004). Most Cambodian children attend some schooling, but a large share complete only very few grades. According to the 2000 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), 85 percent of 15 to 19 year olds had completed grade 1 while only 27 percent had completed grade 7, the first year of lower secondary. These percentages are lower for rural areas, 83 and 21 percent, respectively, and lower yet for rural girls, 78 and 17 percent, respectively (Filmer 2005). To address these problems, the Cambodian government has initiated a series of reforms in the education sector, including scholarship programs for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The program we evaluate is the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (JFPR) scholarship program. This program selected 93 lower secondary schools and, within each of these schools, approximately 45 girls who were beginning 7<sup>th</sup> grade were awarded scholarships of $45 each. The value of the scholarship is large—in 2002, mean per capita GDP in Cambodia was approximately $300 (World Bank 2005). Once a girl is selected for a JFPR scholarship, she is automatically eligible to continue receiving a scholarship for the three years of the lower secondary cycle. The JFPR program therefore attempts to increase the fraction of girls who make the transition from primary school to lower secondary school, and to encourage girls to complete the lower secondary school cycle. In 2003/04, there were 698 lower secondary schools in Cambodia, so the JFPR scholarship program covered approximately 15 percent of lower secondary schools in the country.

Although the JFPR program is known as a “scholarship” program, it does not directly subsidize the fees paid by parents for the education of their daughters; rather, families receive cash transfers provided their daughter is enrolled in school, maintains a passing grade, and is absent without “good reason” fewer than 10 days in a year.<sup>1</sup> The JFPR program therefore functions much like a “conditional cash transfer” (CCT) program of the sort that has been implemented in many Latin American countries.

> 1 Scholarship recipients agree to use funds towards education, but no attempt was made to enforce this agreement.

2