WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 11, 2015—The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Affairs has awarded Jessica Leight, assistant professor of economics at Williams College, a $1.3 million grant to evaluate a girls’ education program in Rajasthan, India. The grant is one of seven awarded by the bureau to strengthen oversight and effectiveness of programs that combat child and forced labor in the developing world.
The project will evaluate the effects on child labor, schooling, and life skills of a non-governmental organization called Room to Read, which focuses on literacy and gender equality in education. Leight’s research team will ask if life-skills training and mentoring by older female role models increase the probability of girls completing secondary school and lower their rates of participation in child labor.
There are substantial gender differences in school attendance and, conversely, in child participation in the workforce in India. Female students in Rajasthan are 50 percent less likely than their male counterparts to be enrolled in secondary school, and those dropout rates place them at higher risk for participation in child and forced labor.
“We hope to learn more about strategies that can help girls minimize their risk of failing out of school,” says Leight, who teaches development economics and political economy at Williams. “We view secondary school as a critical period that can have a huge impact not just for each girl but for other members of her family, and we hope to find out whether and how Room to Read can succeed.”
Room to Read, a non-governmental organization with operations throughout Asia and Africa, works with local communities, partner organizations, and governments to help girls complete secondary school with the relevant life skills they need to succeed. Room to Read builds libraries and schools, publishes children’s books, develops reading and writing curricula, and provides material support, mentoring, and life-skills training for girls through its Girls’ Education program—the focus of this evaluation.
The evaluation will be conducted in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and will encompass 2,500 girls enrolled in 100 secondary schools in Rajasthan. Leight has experience with similar evaluations aimed at understanding household decisions around investment in women and children in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She will lead the project with Eric Edmonds, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and an expert on child labor.
The four-year project will include collaboration with Maheshwor Shrestha, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, as well as with faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development, who bring experience using survey instruments and qualitative methods to understand gender, class, and ethnic inequalities in education.
“With these funds, we will systematically collect evidence about which interventions work and which ones don’t,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez. “We will use these findings to inform our ongoing efforts to make a better world for vulnerable children and adults.”
Leight will travel to India several times a year throughout the grant period to hire and train staff, supervise the evaluation, and oversee data collection. Culminating products will include a report and research articles, which will be widely disseminated to policymakers and stakeholders in India.
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