Topic: Promoting Learning and Reducing Child Labor in Côte d’Ivoire’s through Family- and School-based Interventions

Presenter: Sharon Wolf

Session Details: The study focuses on children in cocoa-growing areas of rural Cote d’Ivoire, a West African country with a population of 25.7 million people with a life expectancy of 57 years (World Bank, 2021). The country ranks 170 of 189 countries on the Human Development Index and is the largest producer of cocoa in the world (UNDP, 2020). In rural cocoa-producing communities, poverty is rampant with many households living on $1–2 a day (World Bank, 2019). Ivorian cocoa production is mostly maintained by small family farmers who mainly use family labor. Impacts from midline (1-year) and endline (2-years) will be presented from a community-randomized trial that tests the individual and combined impacts of two interventions (one focused on poverty reduction, the other on educational quality). Research questions include: (1) Does an unconditional cash transfer reduce child labor and increase school participation and learning outcomes for primary schoolchildren living in cocoa-farming communities? (2) Does technology-supported teacher professional development to improve educational quality – specifically, Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) – increase learning outcomes and reduce child labor? (3) Does TaRL increase the impacts of cash transfers on learning outcomes and child labor? That is, is there value-added by simultaneously (rather than independently) addressing the two issues?

This session will be a seminar and participants are not required to read a paper beforehand.

For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu