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

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. Using an experiment in 229 schools in rural Rajasthan (India), the study measures the effects of the program on students’ school participation and academic performance over two years, while also examining heterogeneous impacts across gender and initial learning ability. It finds that the program increased student enrollment, with the largest effects among girls (7.2 percent in the first year, 12.8 percent in the second). There were large learning gains of 0.329 standard deviations (SDs) in the first year and 0.206 SDs at the end of the second year. The learning component of the intervention targeted both boys and girls — boys and girls benefited equally from the program in terms of test score gains.