Category: Blog

Among the greatest of COVID-19’s ravages is its impact on the already-struggling education sector in Pakistan. Since March 2020, schools have either been completely closed, or have operated under COVID restrictions. While the federal and provincial governments have opted to televise curricular content, the prolonged closure of schools has seen profound learning losses and an increase in drop-outs. For Pakistan, a country with a literacy rate of around 60 percent, this has dire long-term consequences that the government needs to address. In the absence of access to alternative learning modalities, the closure of schools has given rise to learning losses which are considerably greater for students belonging to marginalised groups.

The Digital Divide 

Faced with the need for home-schooling options, the federal and provincial governments decided to air curricular content for K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) through television, as part of the TeleSchool and Taleem Ghar programs, given that it is the most widely accessible medium of communication. However, according to Pakistan’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) conducted in 2017, only about 15 percent of households of the poorest quintile owned a television. Comparatively, within the wealthiest quintile, around 96 percent owned televisions. In addition to this, many teachers across Pakistan have relied on the use of smartphone technology through WhatsApp to relay important information to their students, but access to the internet and smartphones is even more unequal. Only 12 percent of the households surveyed had access to the internet. These figures become more complex considering their dispersion across rural/urban settings. While 22.9 percent of urban households had access to the internet, only 4.9 percent of rural households had the same.  Pre-existing inequalities have translated into limited access to fundamental learning tools, exacerbating the problem.

A report by the World Bank estimates that 930,000 students will drop out from both primary and secondary education because of the pandemic. This is in addition to the 20 million-odd children who are already out of school.

Figures aside, even within households that have access to television or the internet, how likely is it that these would be primarily dedicated to a child’s education? In a household where multiple people rely on one smartphone, it is likely that the phone will be used for other things considered more essential, such as employment purposes. At a broader level, even if there is some access to technology, how conducive are home environments to education? Many children in rural households are actively engaged in farm labour, and even within urban households, children are expected to engage in household chores. Compounded with incidences denoting the rise of violence at home, these facts present a grim picture for home-schooling in Pakistan during the pandemic.

Source: World Bank (2020)

Gendered Impact

The closure of schools has had a pronounced impact on girl’s education. Already, 50 percent of women in Pakistan receive no education to 34 percent of men (DHS, 2017).  During COVID-19, this situation has worsened because girls are usually tasked with the responsibility to provide domestic help. Moreover, girls are more likely to be excluded from access to technology making remote learning even more difficult for them. The burden of care, coupled with a lack of access to essential learning tools means that it is likely the number of out-of-school girls has, and will continue to increase substantially. It is also likely that faced with income losses during the pandemic, some students may be forced to drop out of school and work. In such cases, girls are the first to be taken out of formal educational institutions.

Lessons Learned

CDPR recently conducted a webinar reflecting on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education and the responses adopted by the government, civil society and private institutions. As discussed before, the differential distribution of information technology in Pakistan meant that some students could not be reached through television or other digital platforms. In the absence of avenues for communication, TCF schools and the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) rushed to gather students’ contact information a week before schools were set to close in March 2020. The ITA also gathered information about students’ access to different media, to gauge their response if schools were to be closed for a prolonged period of time. To combat the gap in communication, TCF published a low-cost magazine to encourage student engagement, and relied on community-based learning modules. The ITA liaised with parents and local communities, and with the help of teachers, set up similar community-based spaces for learning for girls. An overarching collaboration between the government, civil society, the private sector, teachers, parents and the larger community forged enduring connections that have proved to be crucial at this time of crisis.

The Way Forward

Looking forward, how can the government improve its response towards education during the pandemic? A blog by Dr. Rabea Malik highlights the need for understanding the multiple ways students have experienced learning losses during the pandemic: potential learning that was lost due to the closure of schools, low-performing students that have fallen further behind compared to well-performing students, and an increase in the number of drop-outs. To ensure that any policy takes account of the inequalities mentioned above, she suggests a three-pronged approach. The government must make use of the Management Information System (MIS) already in place to collect data about at-risk students. It must also plan a large-scale campaign to re-enroll students after schools open and have a system to assess children to provide remedial instruction. Accomplishing these tasks would require a capacity for data collection and its utilisation, as well as provision of teacher training and support at the district and provincial levels. It would also require flexible financing options and a structure that connects small clusters of schools to higher tiers of governance.

If such policy measures are not adopted, Pakistan’s already-struggling education sector will face long-term consequences. Article 25A of the constitution guarantees free and compulsory education for all citizens aged 5 – 16, yet Pakistan has a long way to go before achieving universal enrollment. It is estimated that Pakistan’s Learning Poverty, which is a metric that quantifies the number of children who will not be able to read and understand a simple text, will rise from 75 to 79 percent due to the pandemic. While this has consequences for students’ eventual integration into the job market, that shouldn’t be the only thing of concern. Education can be a vehicle for equity and greater social cohesion, and when it’s missing, poorly delivered or unfairly distributed, a vehicle for injustice and greater social exclusion. It is also a way of inculcating civic skills that allow meaningful participation in civil society and political life. Losing such a large section of school-going children has direct consequences not just for the economy, but for political and social order.

Zohra Aslam is a Communications Assistant at the Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR).

Women in the developing world face an array of vulnerabilities and are at a relative disadvantage when compared to men. In Pakistan for example, they are less likely to receive vital information on health safety, have lower levels of education, and are less likely to own a mobile phone or have internet access. In the context of a pandemic like COVID-19, these disparities only exacerbate with a larger proportion of women being pushed into extreme poverty than men. This is due to a higher probability of employment in the informal sector and lower wages, which are negatively affected in a health-care emergency. Moreover, women often have a higher share of domestic responsibilities which have only increased during the pandemic. Policy needs to tackle this depravation and should be formulated in a way that stems information asymmetries and ensures the provision of essential services so that women are looked after both financially and otherwise.  

Multidimensional gender disparities have worsened globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are further amplified in regions of high fragility, conflict and poverty. Women face a disproportionate impact of such external shocks as they are more exposed to health risks and loss of income. With social confinement measures in place, women also take on a larger share of unpaid care work and become more likely to face gender-based violence. Even when resources and institutional capacity is limited, an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic needs to focus on safeguarding and representing everyone’s interests equitably while ensuring that women remain at the centre of such efforts.

This pandemic has exposed and exacerbated deep-rooted gender inequalities within Pakistan, just as in many other countries. Pakistan already ranks low on the global gender parity index (151 out of 153 countries), performing poorly across most parameters of gender equality. COVID-19 poses a significant risk to any development gains (even marginal) that women have made in the past decade. Despite this, Pakistani women have remained at the forefront of all efforts to fight the pandemic. More than three-fourths of all employees in the country’s health sector are women, while the role they perform as caregivers within households has become of immense importance due to the current arrangement of work-from-home and home-school children.

Are men more prone to contracting the virus?

In Pakistan, it appears that more men than women have been affected by COVID-19 as more than 70% of all positive cases were reported amongst men. This is contrary to WHO figures that show a relatively even distribution of the case load across both genders.  In Pakistan, higher infection amongst men could possibly be due to their more active engagement in the public space as labour force participation rate for men is much higher at 68% compared to 21% for women, far lower than countries with similar income levels. Despite a steady increase in the past decade and a half from a low of 13.7% in 2000, these rates remain the lowest in the world, second only to Afghanistan’s.

However, it is important to note that comparatively lower level of positive  cases amongst women may be a result of lower rates of testing for women rather than a lower rate of infection due to reduced mobility. Regardless, the risk of spreading the disease in-doors still remains high while intra-household dynamics may be preventing women from making independent decisions regarding their health, including accessing healthcare.

Moreover, women in Pakistan are less likely to receive information about COVID-19 for reasons such as limited access to the internet, limited cell phone ownership, and relatively lower levels of education. Women in Pakistan are 37% less likely than men to own a mobile phone or have internet access. Limited access to such necessary information puts not only women, but also their families at higher risk of contagion. In addition, it also limits their access to essential services such as helplines or online platforms in case of health or financial crisis, or incidence of violence.

Economic vulnerability                     

In addition to a substantial rise in overall poverty due to the pandemic, more women than men are likely to be pushed into extreme poverty as they are often less prepared than men to bear the economic impact of such shocks. They typically earn less than men, reporting wages lower by at least 67% compared to men. Women are also more inclined to work in the informal sector with less secure jobs compared to the formal sector. They form 74% of the informal economy, although only 3% of the employed women work in the informal sector while more than half work as contributing family workers. With reduced economic activity due to COVID-19, women remain more vulnerable to layoffs and loss of livelihoods. Girls education is also suffering. When schools reopened in September 2020, approximately 13 million children remained unenrolled, of which 60% have been girls.

Women are essential to the subcontracting system, especially for small enterprises operating out of home-based or informal workshops. Of the 12 million home-based workers in Pakistan, 80% are estimated to be women. Many women employed by small or medium businesses and/or working as domestic workers have faced pay cuts or layoffs due to a slowdown in economic activity and inability of employers to continue paying wages in the face of COVID-19. Pakistan’s women-owned microenterprises, often smaller than men-owned, have been 8% more likely to lose their entire revenue due to the on-going pandemic.

Teaching is a common profession for many working women in Pakistan. Due to indefinite school closures, staff and teachers of many private schools have received substantial cuts in their salaries or faced layoffs as owners try to stay afloat. Getting to work remains a major challenge for most Pakistani women. As smart, localised and intermittent lockdowns continue, hindered mobility and increased absenteeism may also result in loss of employment for many women who lack access to independent means of transportation.

Domestic violence

The onslaught of the pandemic has also brought with it increased burden of domestic violence; a direct association has been observed between number of cases of domestic violence and COVID-19. Government statistics show a 25% increase in incidents of domestic violence during the lockdown just across eastern Punjab alone. Between January and December 2020, the country reported 2,297 cases of violence against women based on data collected from 25 districts (according to a recent report by the Aurat Foundation). At the peak of the pandemic in July, cases of violence against women were highest and rose again with the resurgence of COVID-19 in September last year.

Unpaid care work

In Pakistan, not only do women earn less than men (when their work does not go unrecognised and unremunerated), but they are also more ‘time-poor’. Accounting for both unpaid care and paid work, women work thrice as many hours as men on average globally, and up to 10 times more in Pakistan. There is excessive drudgery and time burden of unpaid care for women. During the lockdown, this disproportionate burden of household work increased even further. As families stayed home all day, basic domestic responsibilities – such as cooking and cleaning – increased as did the burden of home-schooling. An unequal responsibility for unpaid care work continues to constrain women’s mobility and time, impeding their access to education, healthcare, skills development, technology and financial services.

Conclusion

A complete COVID-19 response strategy must focus on women and on enabling them to better handle this crisis. Gender disaggregated data is critical to help inform the response to COVID-19 that is sensitive to the realities of women. Data disaggregated by gender that is publicly available will also encourage the public and private sectors to come up with appropriate solutions. With schools beginning to gradually reopen, the government should make an extra effort in ensuring girls return to schools. Information campaigns can be accompanied with monetary incentives to encourage regular attendance of girls, especially in middle and high school as they are most likely to drop out. Overall, women and girls can suffer decades-long impact if targeted effort is not made towards a gender-equitable COVID-19 response. Continued provision of essential services (family planning, maternal health care, and protection against gender-based violence) is critical.

This article originally appeared on the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) website here. This article is part of IGC’s International Women’s Day series.

Hina Shaikh is a Country Economist for the IGC in Pakistan.

Pakistan currently collects 11.4 percent of GDP in taxes with an estimated tax gap in excess of 50 percent of current collections. A large part of the tax gap is from income tax collections. The widening of Pakistan’s overall tax gap can be attributed to a host of inter-connected factors including fragmented tax administrations, weak enforcement, low compliance, generous and distortionary exemptions and concessions, and narrow tax bases.

Improving income tax is critical for Pakistan to fund service delivery, increase social protection spending and lower compliance costs for taxpayers. With the right policy and administration, income taxes can be the most progressive tax instrument for the government.

Background

Pakistan inherited the tax structure of pre-partition India as per the Government of India Act. After independence, Pakistan adopted the Income Tax Act 1922 as its official income tax law, which was extended to the whole country except some special areas.

Between 1922 and 1979 as many as 71 amendments to the Act of 1922 were passed by the legislature, which made the law cumbersome. To address this, the then government promulgated a new tax law in 1979 to replace the Income Tax Act of 1922. In 2001, the Government of General Pervez Musharraf replaced the 1979 Act by a new tax ordinance. The Income Tax Ordinance of 2001 has so far been amended over 2500 times.

It is important to note that income tax is almost one third of the tax revenue generated in Pakistan, constituting about 32.1 percent of Pakistan’s total tax revenue and 3.7 percent of its GDP in the financial year 2020. In recent years, successive governments have put in place various measures to increase income tax revenues; whether it is by increasing the documentation of the informal economy or bringing improvements in the complex tax code.

Low Performance than Comparator Countries

Pakistan’s income tax collection from salary, business, property and capital as well as from other sources is not only less than its comparator countries but also far lower than its own potential. Low tax collection is a result of gaps in both tax policy and administration.

Figure Sources: Figure 1: World Development Indicators (2017-19) and Figure 2: Addressing Pakistan’s Chronic Fiscal Deficit, 2020

Tax Reform Challenges

While, the primary purpose of taxation is to generate revenue, Pakistan had to deal with issues related to a fragmented tax base, generous income tax thresholds and weak enforcement in the past.

A Fragmented Tax Base

Pakistan’s current income tax regime suffers from a fragmented tax base. All non-agriculture income tax is collected by the federal government through the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), while Agriculture Income Tax (AIT) is collected by provinces at a lower rate. The agricultural income tax gap was recorded at Rs.69.5 billion in the financial year 2020.

While provinces remain reluctant to revise the AIT rates or reform this complicated process, this fragmentation in the tax base has also resulted in significant loss of revenue, as citizens evade taxes by declaring their non-agriculture income as agriculture income.

Generous Income Tax Thresholds

Generous income tax thresholds and rates to make tax structure progressive in Pakistan have also led to extensive loss in tax collection. Larger minimum tax thresholds and lower marginal tax rates for some sectors have further narrowed down the tax base by encouraging tax evasion at the margins. These practices have also overly burdened the compliant sectors, while not enforcing tax law in others. For instance, many sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, continue to remain taxed far below their share in the GDP, while others like petroleum products have been taxed heavily. Such measures not only decrease tax morale and create further distortions in economic activity, but also exacerbate inequality in the country.

Only 2.74 million people file personal income tax in Pakistan, which is just 4.1 percent of the labor force and 1.3 percent of the population in Pakistan. It is important to note that 35 percent of the individual filers pay zero income tax i.e. they fall below the taxable income and did not pay taxes during the year. In addition to this, 64 percent of all filed income tax is from corporate income tax.

Weak Enforcement and Costly Compliance

Tax compliance is costly and difficult because the law on taxation and its practice are very far from each other. While the number of tax filers has doubled from 1 million, due to new prohibitions, tax filers are discouraged to continue filing because of additional questioning of their previous records.

Moreover, the audit and verification of industry’s compliance or tax returns is also a cumbersome process. Although a self-assessment system was one of the biggest achievements in the income tax code, extensive questioning of every single item in the tax returns as well as the companies’ profit and loss statements, and balance sheets in the first assessment order has defeated the purpose of self-assessment.

In addition to this, the verification process is also usually manual, which requires companies to spend additional time translating financial information from their expensive digitized systems.

While weak and slow enforcement allows for rent-seeking opportunities, the number and quality of tax audits is insufficient to correct self-assessment by taxpayers. Currently, the collection on demand is just 4 percent in the country, whereas the rest is reliant on enforcement.

Overreliance on Withholding Tax

In Pakistan, almost 70% of all income tax is collected as withholding tax. To bring more people into the tax net, especially in the informal sector, FBR now levies a high rate on withholding taxes for those not filing their tax returns. However, the international experience is that overreliance on withholding taxes can become counterproductive as instead of bringing more people in the tax net, it may actually reduce them.

Reforming the Income Tax Regime in Pakistan

Harmonization of Income Tax

As a fragmented tax base makes it easier for citizens to evade taxes, it is important to harmonize income tax in Pakistan. The agriculture and non-agriculture income should be taxed on the same principles, preferably by FBR and all collections by FBR should be sent as straight transfers to provinces to reduce provincial administrative costs.

Moreover, it is important to frequently revise the AIT rates to capture value-added, and also use ‘presumptive income taxes’ with appropriate tax rates applied on the difference of estimated value of agricultural outputs and cost of production.

Rationalize Income Tax Rates

It is important to conduct an analysis of the potential loss in tax collection and adjust tax structures in line with regional comparators. Moreover, tax rates should be stable and not change with every finance bill to avoid speculation on tax policy. Pakistan may also consider flat rates versus multiple tax rates but any reform in this direction needs to be viewed in light of its impact on progressivity of income tax.

Widening the Income Tax Base

Currently, the formal economy in Pakistan is over-taxed, while its informal economy suffers from the problem of being under-taxed. This not only narrows down the income tax base, but also discourages people from entering the formal economy due to higher taxes. Currently, the income tax base, including informal economy, is estimated to be around Rs 50 trillion. Hence, it is pertinent that the government focuses on increasing the tax base rather the tax rate for the few, who are taxed.

Improving Tax Administration

It has become increasingly important to strengthen tax enforcement procedures and institute risk-based audits. Strict monitoring measures and investment in human resource capacity building will also be required to improve the performance of FBR.

The complexity that has been brought into the tax code during the past 20 to 25 years is a huge problem for the industry. Hence, automation of the tax systems is pertinent for a successful transition towards a more digitized system with lower compliance costs.

Kashaf Ali is a Research Assistant at the Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR).

Interestingly, the best advice the prime minister has received so far about how to increase exports and revenue has come from his special advisor on institutional reforms and austerity, Dr Ishrat Hussain. Speaking at a Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) webinar recently, Dr Hussain, who is also a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), suggested that Pakistani businesses should diversify out of sunset industries, those that are past their peak and in decline, and invest in sunrise industries, those that are new and growing. He also very wisely said that Pakistan should take advantage of the rapidly growing market for commercial services, especially Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled services, and also try and integrate itself into the supply chains of China and other dynamic Asian markets. The idea is to emulate countries like Taiwan and South Korea and gear our industrial production away from import substitution, which means we only get to export our surplus, and towards what is demanded in growing export markets. The overwhelming focus so far on import substitution industrial production has left us in a position where we hardly produce any raw material anymore, except agri products.

Countries of the economic size and strength of Pakistan cannot afford to swim against international trends for too long. Yet that is exactly what we have been doing for decades. As Dr Hussain pointed out, engineering goods currently account for 67 percent of total global exports while textiles make up about only six percent. In our case, though, textiles form 60 percent of all exports and engineering goods only 6-7 percent. And the fact that Pakistan’s export structure in 2020 is the same as it was in the early 1990s while the rest of the world and even our neighbouring countries have moved way ahead just about says it all. Little wonder then that while world exports have grown from $2.5 trillion in 1992 to $20 trillion in 2020, Pakistan market share of the total declined from 0.18 percent to 0.12 percent in the same period. “Had Pakistan maintained even that share our exports level would have been $36 billion at least – 50 percent more than what we have actually realised,” he noted.

This means that all these years successive governments have been doling out tax incentives and subsidies to the wrong industries and kept at it even in the clear absence of any encouraging results. That way they also ignored up and coming sectors that were trying to penetrate international markets and would have been a far more productive bet. India, on the other hand, has been able to increase its share of total exports from 0.4 percent at the start of the 1990s to 1.7 percent now precisely because governments there did a far better job of keeping an eye on what expanding markets required most urgently and adjusting their local production accordingly.

Pakistan can no longer delay overhauling its export machinery. Fortunately, there are a number of examples, especially in the region, to learn from. Rather than look, without any notable success, for fresh markets for our stale export mix, the commerce ministry must identify new demand trends and then look to become part of the supply chain. Much has changed in the new century about how much of the world conducts its commerce. Yet Pakistan, for some reason, has latched on to ideas and incentivised industries that never really did too many favours to national reserves. This tendency will have to change for the revenue position to improve. Everybody knows that tax collection is not going to improve in a hurry and the surge in remittances is of a very temporary nature, so exports will have to be the game-changer when it comes to the country’s fiscal position otherwise soon there won’t be enough donors and bailout programmes to keep us on our feet. The present government seems pretty determined to focus, and spend, on sectors that can deliver export earnings in the medium- to long-term. It should take Dr Hussain’s advice and look for sunrise industries that it can cater to, and let the sun set on the old model that has got it nothing to write home about in so long.

Ijaz Nabi is the Board Chairperson, Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR)

Around 130 million girls of schooling age, equivalent to the entire population of Mexico or half the population of Indonesia, remain out of school worldwide. Lack of access to education is part of a broader realm of gender inequality as females continue to face barriers in making important decisions related to later life outcomes such as marriage and labor market on their own. These inequalities are a result of patriarchal cultures that assign more resources and power to males, and remain dominant in many developing countries. Expanding education opportunity for girls can help in addressing these gender inequalities since education can endow girls with knowledge, skills, and resources to make life choices to improve their welfare.

In my Job Market paper, I study long-term and intergenerational effects of expanding educational opportunities for girls through a large primary school construction program in Punjab, Pakistan. This is a setting with low levels of education and significant gender disparities in educational attainment. Education levels are particularly lower for girls as parents are not comfortable sending their daughters to walk long distances to school due to safety concerns and social norms. To analyze the impact of expanding educational opportunity, I use variation across birth cohorts and regions in the timing of a large school construction program that started in the 1960s in response to the low education levels. Since most of the school construction happened in rural areas where distances to existing schools were longer, I restrict my focus to rural areas in this study as they are more likely to benefit from improved access to schools.

Did the school construction program work?

I start by analyzing the impact of the school construction program on educational attainment. Since schools are segregated by gender, I analyze impacts of new schools separately by gender using data from household surveys and the population census. I find that the construction of an additional primary girls’ school per 1000 girls of primary school going age at the district level increased the likelihood of receiving any education and completing primary school by 4-5 percentage points and to an overall increase in their years of education by 0.5 years. Given that the mean years of education for the relevant cohorts is only 2.4 years, these effects are quite large and explain around 30 percent of the overall growth in schooling for girls between birth cohorts 1954 to 1958 and 1984 to 1988. Comparatively, there are no statistically significant effects of an additional boys’ school on their educational attainment. My findings suggest that improved access to schools is the driving mechanism behind the results on educational attainment as mobility restrictions, due to social norms, are only relevant for females in this setting.

What about impacts on later life and intergenerational outcomes?

In terms of long-term outcomes, my results suggest that improved educational attainment does not lead to significant effects on the marriage market (as measured by likelihood of marriage, age at marriage, education of spouse) or fertility related outcomes (age at first birth, total children born, child mortality). Exposure to school construction does alter marriage market outcomes for males with their spouses being more educated. However, I do not find evidence of similar effects for females since the male education distribution has not changed as a function of school construction. Moreover, as adults, females who are more exposed to the program are less likely to be part of the labor force. This effect is driven by the lower likelihood of them working in the agriculture sector. One possible explanation for the reduced labor force participation results for females in this context is the female labor force participation may go down first and then increase with education.

The benefits of increased education for females are, however, transmitted to the next generation.  Children born to mothers that are more exposed to the school construction program have higher educational attainment, especially daughters. These results are consistent with existing evidence on intergenerational effects of mother’s primary education on children’s education in the rural Pakistani context.

Why the lack of effects on long-term outcomes?

The lack of impacts on later life outcomes such as age at marriage, age at first birth, total children and labor force participation despite the increased educational attainment suggest the importance of other barriers that females face in this context. A possible reason for the lack of desired effects on later life outcomes is that education levels (at the primary level) are not enough and there is a need to invest in higher levels (secondary schooling) for girls to have the desired long-term outcomes such as delays in age at marriage, and improved labor force participation.

My findings are also consistent with and contribute to a growing literature that finds that females in developing countries continue to face barriers in their ability to make important decisions related to the labor market and the marriage market on their own. These barriers persist despite significant improvements in human capital through education, skill acquisition, or raised generalized self-efficacy.

Policy Recommendations

My findings suggest that gender inequality, restrictive social norms, and low levels of education limit the benefits of increased educational attainment on later life outcomes for rural females. These findings provide valuable insights to policy makers interested in returns to girls education in developing countries. More research is however needed to better understand interventions that can be designed to offer feasible ways to improve long-term outcomes for females in settings where social norms and the economic position of males may mediate the effect of increased educational attainment on longer term outcomes.

Salman Khan is a PhD student at University of Illinois, Chicago, and an IDEAS alum.