Abstract: We use a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on educational and health outcomes of children from low income household in northern rural Burkina Faso. The school feeding programs under consideration are school meals where students are provided with lunch each school day, and take home rations which provide students with 10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90 percent attendance rate. After the program ran for one academic year, we found that both school feeding schemes increased girls’ enrollment by 6 percent.  While we did not observe any significant impact on raw scores on mathematics, we  observed  that  the  time-adjusted  scores  on  mathematics  improved  slightly  for  girls.   An unexpected lower average attendance was observed.  We argue that this reflects the absence of an active labor market and the fact that households are labor constrained and/or child labor is complementary to adult labor.  We show that the interventions caused attendance to decrease in household who are low in child labor supply while attendance improved for households which have a relatively large child labor supply, consistent with the labor constraints.  This, in turn, explains the mixed impacts on learning outcomes that we observed. Finally, for younger siblings of beneficiaries, aged between 12 and 60 months who were not in school, 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.

Abstract: There is a large literature which explores how negative income shocks impact human capital accumulation (especially education) when financial markets are incomplete and households can neither insure nor borrow to smooth their consumption. The main conclusion is that households in these circumstances allocate child time to more labor and to less schooling. Such ex-post use of child time as a self insurance mechanism translates into lower human capital (lower years of education completed) over time which is detrimental to economic growth. There has been, however, little research on the cumulative effects of (perceived) income uncertainty on child education. The intuition is that households that face more a volatile income stream have greater incentives to build up a buffer stock to insure against unforeseen adverse shocks, and non enrollment can be part of such strategy. This paper fills this gap on the literature which focuses on income shocks and education in developing countries. The empirical work uses data from rural Burkina Faso, an environment where school enrollment rates are low and households face frequent income shocks. Controlling for current economic shocks, household wealth levels and child characteristics, I find that income uncertainty (expressed as income variance) consistently reduces a number of education outcomes, including current enrollment status, education expenditures per child, the number of years of education completed and the probability of having been ever enrolled. The estimation results suggest that income uncertainty might have large welfare costs in terms of human capital.