Did Social Safety Net Scholarships Reduce Drop-Out Rates During the Indonesian Economic Crisis?
The author uses regression and matching techniques to evaluate Indonesia's Social Safety Net Scholarships Program, which was developed to keep large numbers of children from dropping out of school as a result of the Asian crisis. It was expect...
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, D.C.
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2002/03/1732225/social-safety-net-scholarships-reduce-drop-out-rates-during-indonesian-economic-crisis http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14843 |
| Summary: | The author uses regression and matching
techniques to evaluate Indonesia's Social Safety Net
Scholarships Program, which was developed to keep large
numbers of children from dropping out of school as a result
of the Asian crisis. It was expected that many families
would find it difficult to keep their children in school and
that dropout rates would be high, as they were during a
recession in the 1980s. But dropouts did not increase
markedly and enrollment rates remained relatively steady.
The author examines the role the scholarship program played
in producing this result. She found the scholarships to have
been effective in reducing dropouts in the lower secondary
school (where students are more susceptible to dropping out)
by about 3 percentage points. They had no discernible impact
in primary and upper secondary schools. The author also
examines how well the program adhered to its documented
targeting design and how effective that design was in
reaching the poor. Committees that allocated the
scholarships followed the criteria diligently, but a
significant percentage of scholarships did go to students
from households with high reported per capita expenditures,
if household expenditure data are reliable. It is unclear
how targeting can be improved, giving the scarcity of
accurate local household data in most countries. Using local
monitoring could help but then monitoring for accountability
would be more difficult. Preliminary evidence favors
focusing safety net scholarships--designed to reduce dropout
rates during an economic crisis--on lower secondary schools,
continuing to target children (especially older students)
from large families, scaling back scholarships to private
schools at the lower secondary level, or targeting the
households hurt most by the crisis. |
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