The impact of Zambia's unconditional child grant on schooling and work: results from a large-scale social experiment.

This paper reports the impact on child schooling and work of the Government of Zambia's Child Grant Program (CGP), an unconditional cash transfer program targeted to households with children under age 3 years in three districts of the country. Although the CGP's focus is on very young children, we look to see if the program has impacts on older children who are not the explicit target group. We use data from a large-scale social experiment involving 2,519 households, half of whom were randomized out to a delayed-entry control group, that was implemented to assess the impact of the program. We find that the CGP has no discernable impact on school enrollment of children age 7-14. However when we break the sample by older (11-14) and younger (7-10) children - based on the grade structure of the Zambian schooling system - we find a significant impact among children age 11-14 which coincided with the exact age range where sharp drop-out begins to occur in Zambia with point estimates in the range of 7-8 percentage points. Finally, we provide evidence on the potential pathways through which the unconditional cash transfer impacts on enrollment. Households in the CGP spend more on education, and in particular on uniforms and shoes, two items cited as key barriers to school enrollment in study areas.