Effects of a Multi-Faceted Education Program on Enrollment, Equity, Learning, and School Management: Evidence from India

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals set a triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This paper documents the effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program, pursuing these three objectives simultaneously, in rural India. Using an experiment in 230 schools, the paper measures the effects of the program on students' school participation and academic performance over two years, while also examining heterogeneous impacts and sustainability. The findings show that the program increased enrollment, especially among girls (8.1 percent in the first year, 11.7 percent in the second), reducing gender gaps in school retention. The findings show large learning gains of 0.323 standard deviation due to the program in the first year and 0.156 standard deviation at the end of the second year, which did not vary by gender. There were also large effects on school management outcomes, increasing the number of meetings by 16 percent and the number of improvement plans completed by 25 percent.