International Child Sponsorship Improves School Performance: Evidence from Goma (DRC)

This paper provides new evidence on the impact on the educational attainment of an international child support (ICS) program, implemented in ten primary schools located in the peri-urban districts of the city of Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo). Using original microdata from a sample of 309 children (treated, 121; control, 188), we explore, through a difference-in-differences approach, whether the ICS program, which reduces the structural uncertainty faced by the targeted pupils and their families, impacts on a broad set of alternative educational outcomes—namely, performance scores in four different subjects (civic education and religion, French languages, national languages and mathematics), total score, failure and school drop-out rates. The results show that sponsored children report lower drop-out and failure rates in comparison to their control peers and that they succeed in catching up in all subjects in two school years. Results are robust to the implementation of a coarsened exact matching procedure, exploiting the data structure to produce unbiased estimates along with bounded ex-post balancing.