Does Education Empower Girls? Evidence from Mali

This paper brings new evidence on the importance of school interventions that target the wider environment of girls (school teachers, parents and community faith leaders) as the enabling mechanism to their empowerment. We show how supporting schooling promotes girls’ empowerment by illustrating the short-term impact of the ‘Girls Can’ project, a four-years intervention in Southern Mali which aimed to increase girls’ school retention rates and transition rates from the primary to the secondary cycle of school through a wide range of girl-friendly activities. Using original data collected at the end of the project, instrumental variables are applied to control for the potential endogeneity between project participation and girls’ empowerment after identifying comparable groups of ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ girls through coarsened exact matching. We find that the project has a statistically significant impact on girls’ empowerment, and that the intervention was an economically affordable investment at USD67 per girl per year. In addition to the effect on the aggregate measure of empowerment, and on achieving a higher transition rate to secondary school. the evaluation identifies the key domains of impact: girls’ awareness of the risks of early pregnancy, their ability to stay on track in school, their confidence in reporting acts of violence perpetrated on their peers, and girls’ positive perception of being part of an environment supporting their schooling.