In Uganda, researchers partnered with Educate! to study the impact of the Educate! Experience program— a leadership and entrepreneurship skill development program for secondary school students—on economic and social welfare, as well as on intimate partner violence. Preliminary results suggest that four years after the intervention, graduates’ soft skills improved relative to non-graduates, as did their graduation rates from secondary school and enrollment in tertiary education (for women). Important positive social impacts were also recorded. Educate! graduates reported fewer sexual partners, being less sexually active, and delaying family formation. They exhibited more egalitarian gender views and expressed reduced social acceptability of violence, as well as a lower incidence or threats of physical violence. 
 

Read the full summary here.

Researchers: Isaac Mbiti, Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero, Youdi Schipper, Constantine Manda, Rakesh Rajani
 

Improving education quality in low-income countries is a top priority in international development, with governments and donors spending over a hundred billion dollars annually on education. In Tanzania, researchers evaluated the impact on student learning of providing schools with an unconditional cash grant, a teacher incentive program, or both. In a paper published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers report that the cash grant alone had no impact on student learning, while the teacher incentive program alone had mixed results. However, combining both programs together had a significant positive impact on student learning—larger than the sum of the effects of each individual component alone. These results suggest that combining spending on school inputs (the default policy) with improved teacher incentives could substantially increase the cost-effectiveness of public spending on education.
 

Read the full summary here and the published paper here.