Kenya Girls' Primary School Merit Scholarship Program

Summary

The Kenya Girls' Scholarship experiment found that merit scholarships raised test scores substantially — but the most striking finding was the spillover to boys, who were explicitly ineligible for the incentive. Boys in treatment schools outperformed boys in control schools by 12.5 percentile points, suggesting that the scholarship changed the learning environment in the classroom, not just individual effort. The likely mechanism: teacher behavior changed. Teachers in treatment schools reported spending more time on academic content, called in more substitute teachers when absent, and received higher satisfaction ratings from students. An incentive aimed at girls appears to have shifted the entire classroom norm toward academic effort. The experiment illustrates how individual incentive programs can produce system-level effects that naive evaluations would miss.

Research question

"Does offering merit-based scholarships to the top-performing girls in a school district improve educational outcomes — and do competitive incentives spill over to non-eligible students?"

Methodology

Result

Positive

Girls in treatment schools improved test scores by 19.5 percentile points at year-end; boys in treatment schools also improved significantly (12.5 percentile points), despite being ineligible for the scholarship — indicating positive peer spillovers

Evidence strength

Strong

Randomized controlled trial with large sample.

Replication status

Partially replicated