Gender-Based Violence in Schools and Girls’ Education: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique
School-related gender-based violence (GBV) is pervasive, yet evidence on effective interventions to curb violence is limited, particularly in settings where perpetrators face weak accountability and victims and bystanders have limited agency for reporting. We evaluate a policy in Mozambique that combined teacher training to strengthen schools’ capacity to respond to GBV with guided student discussion sessions to increase awareness around violence and reporting of abuse. To examine differential effects and complementarities across genders, student training was randomly targeted to girls, boys, or both. The intervention reduced sexual violence perpetrated by teachers against girls by 67 percent in all treated schools, regardless of the gender of students trained. Yet when girls received the student training, girls’ school enrollment increased by 10 percent. The evidence is consistent with victim engagement playing a role in translating reductions in violence into educational gains: training girls increased reporting of GBV to trained school staff, who were more likely to formally report cases to school authorities. Administrative data from the national child helpline further show increases in GBV-related calls and investigations. Our findings highlight the importance of institutional accountability in constraining abuse by powerful actors and of engaging victims in reporting mechanisms to translate safer school environments into human capital investment.
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Copy CitationSofia Amaral, Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos, Sarita P. Ore-Quispe, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi, "Gender-Based Violence in Schools and Girls’ Education: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique," NBER Working Paper 33203 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w33203.Download Citation
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