# **I. Introduction**

Human capital investments during children’s critical years were severely affected in the course of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014-15. Schools were closed almost a full year. Primary health centers were avoided for fear of Ebola. Consequently, school enrollment, health checkups and vaccination rates fell significantly and did not fully recover in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic (Wilhelm and Helleringer, 2019). In this context, programs that incentivize these investments could have large effects on human capital accumulation and a long-lasting effect on poverty reduction.

Poverty-targeted Cash Transfers (CT) programs are known to have significant positive effects on schooling and health (Molina Millán et al., 2019). In developing countries, school enrollment is sensitive to costs (Kremer et al. 2013).<sup>3</sup> Therefore, poverty-targeted CT, whether conditional or unconditional, are known to alleviate the resource constraint and to increase children’s school enrollment as well as health inputs.

In this paper, we evaluate a program that was set up in Guinea as an immediate response to the Ebola crisis. The program was poverty targeted and consisted of cash transfers and information campaigns to parents to raise awareness of the importance of schooling and health investments. The program was randomized at two levels. A first level was between treated and control villages. The second level of randomization took place within treated villages in which households were randomly distributed in three different treatment arms: (i) no cash transfer (information campaign only), (ii) a cash transfer of 70,000 Guinean francs or approximately 8 USD/quarter/child over 2 years (with information campaign), and (iii) a cash transfer twice as large as in group (ii) (with information campaign). In treated villages, households received cash conditional only on attending the information campaign promoting good health practices and schooling.

In a context that might be similar to the situation many countries might confront when the COVID-19 pandemic eases and finally ends, school enrollment increased nationwide and rapidly in Guinea in the aftermath of Ebola. We find that it increased significantly more in treated villages. From a low baseline of around 40 percent of primary-school age enrollment,<sup>4</sup> treated villages increased their school enrollment by more than 11 percentage points compared to control villages. But this massive increase in school enrollment did not lead to impacts on learning outcomes as measured by mathematics, French and literacy.

This result is in line with the previous literature on cash transfers, which is large and has been reviewed extensively (Fiszbein and Schady 2009; Snilstveit et al. 2015, Ganimian and Murnane, 2016; Glewwe and Muralidharan, 2016 and Molina Millán et al., 2019). The overall conclusion

> 3 In our data, the main reasons given for not sending children to school are 35 percent because of its cost and another 13 percent because of the need for the child to work (at home, field or in town).

> 4 The baseline survey was conducted during the Ebola crisis, but the question on enrollment refers to the situation just before the Ebola crisis.

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