June 2000, Vol. 6, No. 2

Education
Incentives Help Delay Marriage Among Bangladeshi Girls

In much of Bangladesh, a largely rural, agrarian society, education has historically been affordable only for the wealthy. As an attempt to remedy this situation, the government instituted two school incentive programs. One scheme provides wheat to the parents of poor primary-school girls and boys, the other offers scholarship money to female secondary- school students. Both programs eliminate school fees and provide free books. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), a nongovernmental organization, administers another program for primary-school students that also provides books and stationery and eliminates fees.

Population Council demographer Sajeda Amin and her colleagues, Mary Arends-Kuenning of the University of Illinois and Gilda Sedgh, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, assessed the effects of these programs on various aspects of boys’ and girls’ lives. They found that the programs have had significant influence.

Two villages
Amin and her colleagues studied two rural villages, dubbed Village A and Village B, in northern Bangladesh. Both villages have primary schools, but only Village B has a secondary school. Secondary-school students from Village A must travel about 2 kilometers (1.25 miles). In 1994, the government founded both the wheat-for-education program and the secondary-school scholarship program for girls. The researchers compared data from August 1992 and August 1995 (a time of year with low agricultural labor demand), as well as data from May 1992 and May 1996 (a time of year with high agricultural labor demand).

The primary-school incentive scheme, which targets children in grades 1 through 5, is only available in Village B. It entitles students from poor families to 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of wheat each month if they maintain 85 percent attendance. This amount of wheat costs about $2–$4, a wage that a child could earn by working between two and four and a half days a month. The program tries to reach the poorest 40 percent of rural boys and girls.

The secondary-school scholarship program for girls has been instituted throughout Bangladesh and provides a monthly stipend equal to about $1–$2. Initially the scholarships were offered to girls in grades 6 and 9; in 1996, they were extended to girls in grades 7 and 8. Parents of daughters receiving scholarships must sign an agreement stating that the girls will not be married before they reach age 18.

BRAC runs two primary schools in both villages studied. The schools in Village A were founded in 1993 and 1994, and those in Village B were both opened in 1996. BRAC strives to maintain a student body ratio of 70 percent girls. Children from poor families are given preference for enrollment, and the program seeks to enroll dropouts from the regular school system.

Program influences
One influence of the three programs was to increase the number of children who were attending a grade appropriate for their age. Reflecting this, students in 1995 and 1996 entered school at age six in higher proportions than they did in 1992. After the incentive programs began, the proportion of 6–19-year-olds who had never attended school decreased sharply for both sexes in the two villages.

While, on average, girls and boys in all age groups spent a greater number of hours on school activities, the incentive programs had differing impacts on boys and girls. In general, 1992 data show that more girls than boys were in primary school, and more boys than girls were in secondary school. By 1996, however, the opposite was true. “During primary school, when the incentive program was aimed at both boys and girls, parents may have increased boys’ time in school over that of girls. During secondary school, when the incentive program targeted only girls, parents may have favored daughters’ school attendance,” contends Amin.

Gender and work
The research reveals that children are still likely to have time to make significant contributions to the family economy because school hours are short: between two and five hours a day, depending on grade. As with time spent in school, however, time spent at work differed by gender. Between 1992 and 1996, for example, school girls aged 11 to 19 decreased the amount of daily time they spent doing house-work by between 20 and 40 minutes. During that same period, on the other hand, boys aged 11 to 19 increased their hours spent in wage work by 63 percent. “In addition to the motivation provided by the schooling incentives, parents’ impulses to send girls to school may have been strengthened because the work done by girls, largely housework, is more easily combined with schoolwork than is the work done by boys, often wage work,” says Arends-Kuenning.

Although the incentives were designed to correct gender disparities, the substitution of labor for education among adolescent boys surprised the investigators. They conceded that ideally both boys and girls should attend school; however, they concluded that “the preferential treatment of girls under this program is justified, at least in the short run, until gender equality is achieved in educational attainment.”

The delay in marriage
The research shows that the secondary-school scholarships had an immediate effect in delaying marriage. In 1992, 36 percent of 11–19- year-old girls in the study villages were married, compared with 32 percent in 1995. If sustained, these delays can have considerable long-term implications for women’s status, since early ages at marriage and childbearing have long been held to be strongly associated with gender inequality.

“In Bangladesh, the prevalence of early marriage dictates that parents’ decisions to send adolescent girls to school be closely linked with marriage-timing decisions,” says Amin. Families pay large dowries to husbands’ families; saving for dowries is a constant preoccupation. The following remark from the father of a two-year-old girl illuminates the complex calculus that goes into making the decision to educate a daughter in rural Bangladesh: “If I try to achieve a B.A. for my daughter, then I have to find a provider who has an M.A. . . . Suppose I educate my daughter up to grade 10—uneducated boys will not come for her out of shame, and dowry paid to educated boys will also be expensive. . . . I will keep my daughter in school up to grade 4 or 7, then marry her off.”

The investigators speculate that parents are responding to the immediate monetary motivation of the schooling incentives, and this may be sufficient to have a significant effect on postponing marriage. However, longer-lasting effects may be limited as long as young age is considered a desirable attribute in marriage, and as long as education comes at the cost of higher dowry payments to compensate for the older age of the bride. Permanent changes can only come about as the benefits of education for girls become more evident to society.

Sources
Arends-Kuenning, Mary and Sajeda Amin. 2000. “The effects of schooling incentive programs on household resource allocation in Bangladesh.” Policy Research Division Working Paper no. 133. New York: Population Council. (PDF)