The impact of mentoring and life skills on secondary school progression and child labor among girls: A randomized controlled trial in Rajasthan, India

Last registered on October 25, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
The impact of mentoring and life skills on secondary school progression and child labor among girls: A randomized controlled trial in Rajasthan, India
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0001046
Initial registration date
February 08, 2016

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
February 08, 2016, 3:49 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
October 25, 2023, 3:35 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
University of Illinois at Chicago

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Williams College
PI Affiliation
Dartmouth College

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2016-02-12
End date
2019-05-30
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Throughout the developing world, there are substantial gender differences in school attendance and the economic lives of children. Moreover, these differences generally widen as cohorts age as the gap between male and female enrollment increases. Female students are accordingly less likely than their male peers both to enter and to graduate from secondary school. This dropout risk is associated with vulnerability to child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.

This evaluation seeks to answer the question of whether life skills training and mentoring by older female role models, denoted “social mobilizers”, can improve school progression and non-cognitive skills for girls while reducing their engagement in child labor. The project is being implemented by Williams College in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the non-governmental organization Room to Read. The objective is to evaluate Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program, and the sample includes 2,551 girls in 119 schools that are located in the Ajmer District of Rajasthan, India. To evaluate program impacts, girls in 60 of the 119 schools were randomly assigned to receive Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program, while girls attending the remaining 59 schools were assigned to the control group.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Edmonds, Eric, Benjamin Feigenberg and Jessica Leight. 2023. "The impact of mentoring and life skills on secondary school progression and child labor among girls: A randomized controlled trial in Rajasthan, India." AEA RCT Registry. October 25. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1046-4.0
Former Citation
Edmonds, Eric, Benjamin Feigenberg and Jessica Leight. 2023. "The impact of mentoring and life skills on secondary school progression and child labor among girls: A randomized controlled trial in Rajasthan, India." AEA RCT Registry. October 25. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1046/history/197983
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
This evaluation seeks to answer the question of whether life skills training and mentoring by older female role models, denoted “social mobilizers”, can improve school progression and non-cognitive skills for girls while reducing their engagement in child labor. The project is being implemented by Williams College in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the non-governmental organization Room to Read. The objective is to evaluate Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program, and the sample includes 2,551 girls in 119 schools that are located in the Ajmer District of Rajasthan, India. To evaluate program impacts, girls in 60 of the 119 schools were randomly assigned to receive Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program, while girls attending the remaining 59 schools were assigned to the control group.
Intervention Start Date
2016-06-15
Intervention End Date
2018-06-15

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
We will examine the impact of Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program on four primary sets of outcomes: (1) School progression and completion, (2) Life skills, (3) Child labor, and (4) Cognitive skills and academic achievement. Please see the included analysis plan for construction of specific outcome measures and relevant indices.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
For all constructed indices, we will first take the difference between each component survey response value and the mean within the control group and then divide by the control group standard deviation. We will then average over all index components, ensuring that values for each component are constructed so that the index interpretation is consistent (i.e. higher values of empowerment index components all correspond to higher levels of empowerment). Note that at each analysis phase, the control group mean and standard deviation will be calculated from the concurrent data (i.e. control group mean and standard deviation will be calculated in the follow-up data when outcomes from the follow-up data are being analyzed).

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The sample includes 119 schools that are located in the Ajmer District of Rajasthan, India. The sample consists of those schools in Ajmer that had between 16 and 32 girls enrolled in class five as of Fall 2015, did not have any other NGOs providing life skills curricula to students, and had a classroom in acceptable condition in which a life skills class could take place. The full analysis sample will include all female students who were currently enrolled in class five in these schools as of January 2016 (2,551 female students in total). We conducted a stratified randomization that assigned 60 of the 119 sample schools to the Treatment group. Randomization was stratified based on whether schools were above or below median quality, where quality was defined based on a normalized index that included measures of teacher experience, teachers’ educational attainment, and classroom and school infrastructure quality. All girls in Treatment schools will receive the Room to Read intervention during the school year beginning in June, 2016. Girls enrolled in the remaining 59 schools are assigned to the Control group.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer.
Randomization Unit
School-level randomization
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
119 schools
Sample size: planned number of observations
2,551 female students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
60 schools assigned to treatment and 59 schools assigned to control.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Given the available sample, power calculations suggest that we will be able to detect increases of 4 percentage points in child enrollment and decreases of 3 and 8 percentage points for child marriage and wage work, respectively. These minimum detectable effects sizes are calculated based on 0.90 power, a one-sided hypothesis test conducted with a p-value of .05, and assumed intraclass correlations of 0.06, 0.00, and 0.10 for child enrollment, child marriage and wage work, respectively. We note that intraclass correlation values are calculated based on existing pilot data to the extent possible. Based on pilot data, we estimate that 92% of girls will progress to secondary school in the control group, 11% of girls will be married before age 14 in the control group, and 32% of girls in the control group will report wage-earning activities in the past 7 days.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Williams College Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2015-06-15
IRB Approval Number
N/A
IRB Name
IFMR Human Subjects Committee
IRB Approval Date
2015-02-06
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
June 30, 2018, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
August 30, 2018, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
119 schools
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
2,435 girls
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
Yes

Program Files

Program Files
Yes
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Abstract
More than 98 million adolescent girls are not in school. Can girls influence their schooling without changes in their family's economic environment? In Rajasthan, India, we examine the impact of a school-based life skills program that seeks to address low aspirations, narrow societal roles for girls and women, restricted networks of social support, and limited decision-making power. We find the intervention causes a 25% decline in school dropout that persists from seventh grade through the transition to high school. Improvements in socioemotional support among girls exposed to the intervention seem especially important in their decision to stay in school.
Citation
Eric Edmonds, Ben Feigenberg, Jessica Leight; Advancing the Agency of Adolescent Girls. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2023; 105 (4): 852–866. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01074

Reports & Other Materials