Independent Evaluation of the Girls’ Education Challenge Phase II – Aggregate Impact of GEC-T Projects Between Baseline and Midline Study – Final Report

Correlation between improvement in IO factor and learning change (in percentage points) for panel sample (recontacted girls)

Note: All regressions control for girls’ age and being overaged and use beneficiary population weights and cluster standard errors at the project level.

Key: Ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficients with two asterisks are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level (P-value lower than 0.05 = 5%). Those with one asterisk are statistically significant at the 90% level (P-value lower than 0.1 = 10%). P-values for statistically significant coefficients are included in the brackets.

Green cells show positive and statistically significant associations (improvement of intermediate outcomes is positively and significantly associated with learning change), orange shows negative and statistically significant associations (improvement of intermediate outcomes is negatively and statistically significantly associated with learning change).

*Positive improvement in IO factor ‘Thinks that succeeded at school because of hard work’ is not found to be statistically significantly correlated with learning change despite large coefficients as shown in the table due to extremely low number of observations in the omitted category (disagree in baseline – disagree in midline) which consists of 6 girls for EGRA and EGMA, 48 girls for SeGMA, and 51 for SeGRA.

Factors found positively correlated with learning change include improved girls’ self-confidence, classroom positive atmosphere, decrease in self-perceived school-based loneliness, and various factors of parental attitudes. Importantly, where there are improvements in intermediate outcomes over and above the comparison group, an improvement in the intermediate outcome is often associated with an increase in learning scores However, several factor improvements are in fact found to be negatively associated with a learning change. Namely, gender bias of teacher asking more / harder questions to one gender, use of different language to help students understand, recognition of impact of choices made today on future girls’ outcomes, or school attainment in the current school year. As such, while GEC-T improved intermediate outcome factors, these are necessary, but sometimes insufficient to raise learning levels.