Conditional cash transfers and school enrollment : impact of the conditional cash transfer program in the Philippines

Despite modest economic growth over the past decade, the Philippines have made little progress in reducing poverty. In this regard, the Philippines is an outlier in the region, seemingly unable to translate economic growth into meaningful poverty reduction. This underscores the fact that structural poverty remains a binding constraint to equitable growth. Furthermore, the Philippines remains highly vulnerable to climatic and other adverse shocks, making the task of poverty reduction even more challenging. To help meet short-term consumption needs while fostering investment in human capital to help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty, the Philippines launched a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in early 2008. This study represents a first step toward rigorously documenting the causal impact of the CCT program, focusing on school enrollment from a small selective sample survey. Primarily for illustrative purposes, the study concentrated on areas where education outcomes were low before the intervention, to determine the impact on marginalized areas. The study compared school enrollment before and after CCT program implementation, using panel data of about 2,000 CCT and non-CCT children from 900 sample households in three regions of the country. The baseline data was collected in 2008 before program implementation, matched to the follow-up survey which was conducted in 2011. Under the CCT program, households receive cash transfers conditional on school enrollment and regular attendance of children aged 6-14, therefore the analysis used the sample of children aged 6-14 during the baseline (2008), and the same children aged 9-17 at the time of the follow-up survey (2011).