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educational and health impacts of two school feeding schemes: evidence from a randomized trial in rural burkina faso

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Kazianga, H., D. Walque, et al. (2009) "Educational and health impacts of two school feeding schemes: evidence from a randomized trial in rural Burkina Faso." The World Bank Report No.: Policy Research Working Paper Series 4976

Intro: This paper uses a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on health and education outcomes for children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso.

Methods: The two school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where students are provided with lunch each school day, and, on the other hand, take-home rations that provide girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90 percent attendance rate.

Results: After running for one academic year, both programs increased girls' enrollment by 5 to 6 percentage points. While there was no observable significant impact on raw scores in mathematics, the time-adjusted scores in mathematics improved slightly for girls. The interventions caused absenteeism to increase in households that were low in child labor supply while absenteeism decreased for households that had a relatively large child labor supply, consistent with the labor constraints. Finally, for younger siblings of beneficiaries, aged between 12 and 60 months, take-home rations have increased weight-for-age by .38 standard deviations and weight-for-height by .33 standard deviations. In contrast, school meals did not have any significant impact on the nutrition of younger children