Adult Education and Missing Women: Evidence from India's Saakshar Bharat Literacy Program
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Nearly 800 million adults are illiterate worldwide, two-thirds of them women. Gender gaps in educational attainment coincide with inequities in health, personal agency, and labor market outcomes. With the aim of reducing the gender disparity in basic education among adults, the Government of India’s Saakshar Bharat program provided functional literacy training to over 70 million women in 157,000 village-level literacy centers between 2009 and 2018. Despite its size and scope, there have been no comprehensive quantitative evaluations of this program. Using a regression discontinuity approach, I find that the program raised female literacy rates in eligible districts by three percentage points and lowered mortality among elderly women and infant girls in eligible districts. Younger program-eligible women were more likely to work and experienced greater personal autonomy. Reductions in female child mortality, however, are accompanied by a rise in sex ratios at birth, leading to an overall increase in missing girls. The results indicate the promise of large-scale female empowerment programs — as well as the need to anticipate unintended interactions with persistent cultural norms.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 14, 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Shankar, Nikhil |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Miller, Grant |
| Advisor | Clerici-Arias, Marcelo |
Subjects
| Subject | Department of Economics |
|---|---|
| Subject | health |
| Subject | education |
| Subject | gender |
| Subject | mortality |
| Subject | sex selection |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
| Related item | |
|---|---|
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ht235kp9815 |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Shankar, Nikhil. (2020). Adult Education and Missing Women: Evidence from India's Saakshar Bharat Literacy Program. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/ht235kp9815
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- shankar8@alumni.stanford.edu
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