The Effects of "Girl-Friendly" Schools: Evidence from the BRIGHT School Construction Program in Burkina Faso

This paper is based on an evaluation of the BRIGHT program funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U.S. government agency. We are grateful to several officials at MCC, including Sophia van der Bijl, Malik Chaka, Sophia Sahaf, and Franck Wiebe, for their help throughout the project. We are also grateful to the many people in Burkina Faso who were instrumental in making this study possible, including Michel Kabore (USAID) and several Ministry of Education officials who allowed us to interview them and gave us access to the application data, a key source of data. We also thank staff members at the four implementing agencies (Plan International, CRS, TinTua, and FAWE) for the information they provided to us, in particular to Fritz Foster (Plan International), Makasa Kabongo (chief of party, BRIGHT project), and Debra Shomberg (CRS country director). This study would not have been possible without the work and commitment of the many people who collected data in the evaluation. Collecting school and household data in almost 300 rural villages in Burkina Faso was an important and challenging task in this study. We are particularly grateful to Jean Pierre Sawadogo, Robert Ouedraogo, and Pam Zahonogo at the University of Ouagadougou for their commitment, hard work, advice, and leadership in the data collection process. We would like to thank Ama Baafra Abeberese, Jesse Antilles-Hughes, Joel Smith, and Ama Takyi for excellent research assistance. Finally, we would also like to thank many people who gave us insightful comments on the research, including Peter Schochet, Anu Rangarajan, and seminar participants at APPAM, Harvard Kennedy School, Mathematica Policy Research, MCC, SREE, and USAID. Corresponding author: Linden, leigh.linden@austin.utexas.edu. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.