42 percent. Schooling disruptions (schools were closed almost a full year in 2014) _cannot_ explain the low enrollment rates at the time of the baseline, because the question asks whether parents enrolled their children in school, and thus refers a pre-Ebola situation. Schools closed in early 2014 due to Ebola, thus affecting the end of the 2013-14 school year. In the 2014-15 school year, because of Ebola, schools did not open in early October as usual, but instead in late January 2015. The political turmoil due to the elections in 2015 also disrupted the 2015-16 school year, in which schools opened in November instead of early October, because of a teachers’ national strike.

# 1. School enrollment

School enrollment was extremely low, by any international comparison, at the time of the baseline survey in June-August 2014. We derive school enrollment by asking parents whether their child is currently enrolled and whether she went to school during the school year. As shown in the left panel of Figure 4, school enrollment at the baseline for all children aged 5-15 years was at 42 percent (41.1 and 43.1 percent respectively for treated and control villages).

Figure 4 shows that school enrollment increased significantly in all of Guinea between 2014 and 2018. By the time of the endline in 2018, school enrollment reached 70 percent. The left panel of Figure 3 suggests that school enrollment increased significantly more in treated villages. It reached almost 66 percent in control and 74 percent in treated villages. The left panel of Figure 4 alone strongly suggests that the program was successful in increasing school enrollment more in treated villages.

Table 3 confirms that compared to control villages, treated villages see a significantly stronger increase in enrollment. The first column of Table 3 presents equation 1, comparing treated to control villages. The effect of the treatment is an increase of 11.8 percentage points in the enrollment rate. The time trend indicates that between 2014 and 2018 the overall increase in enrollment across all villages (treated and control) was 24 percentage points. The coefficient for girls is significant and suggests that girls have enrollment rates that are six percentage points lower than boys. The third column in Table 3 leaves out the untreated households in treated villages (those that did not receive cash but were offered information sessions). The effect is of similar magnitude (12.4 percentage points increase for the treated households). All regressions control for age, the square of age, ethnicity fixed effects and household size. To control for differences in levels we added village-level fixed effects (148 villages) in all regressions, and we cluster standard errors at the village level, which is the geographical level of the first randomization.

The increase in school enrollment was heterogeneous by age, as shown in Figures 5 and 6. The increase was much higher for children between ages 8 and 12 years at the time of the surveys. Focusing on this age group completes our understanding of what happened to school enrollment. Four years passed between the two surveys, and the program may have had a higher impact on the likelihood of being enrolled for the children that were at the age of school entry during this 9