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

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of an International Child Support (ICS) program, implemented in ten primary schools located in the outskirts of Goma (Congo, DR), on school performances. Using original micro data in a sample of 309 children (121 treated and 188 control), we explore whether the ICS program impacts on a broad set of alternative educational outcomes - namely, performance scores in 4 different subjects (plus total score), failure rates and school drop-out rates - through a Difference-in-Differences approach. The results show that sponsored children report lower drop-out rates and failure rates with respect to their control peers and, while lagging behind before the program started, in two school years they catch-up in all subjects. Results are robust to the implementation of Coarsened Exact Matching that exploits the structure of the data to produce unbiased estimates along with bounded ex-post balancing.