The challenge
Rural children left school early to work, and poor families rarely used preventive health care.
The case
In 1997 Mexico's federal government replaced poorly targeted food subsidies with bimonthly cash payments to mothers in poor rural households, conditional on their children attending school and the family keeping up health check-ups. Grants were larger for girls in secondary school. Because the budget only allowed a phased rollout, communities in the evaluation were randomly assigned to start first or later, creating a rigorous comparison. Secondary enrollment rose, most of all for girls, and researchers estimated 0.66 extra years of schooling for children of poor families. The program grew to reach roughly a quarter of Mexican households before it was replaced in 2019.
Why it worked
Building the evaluation into the rollout made the results hard to argue with, which helped the program survive changes of government and spread to dozens of countries. Even so, strong evidence did not stop it from being cancelled decades later.
Sources
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