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Investigators

Edward Miguel (UC Berkeley), Michael Kremer (Harvard)

Development Challenge

This project is a follow-up to the Primary School Deworming Project (PSDP), and aims to estimate the long-term impacts of the PSDP on the life outcomes of Kenyan children. The PSDP provided free medical treatment for intestinal helminths (worms), a serious health problem for Kenyan children, to children in 75 rural primary schools in Busia District in Western Kenya. Our research found that deworming had significant health and nutritional impacts and led to dramatic gains in school attendance and enrollment; the current study will estimate the impact of the program on later educational, labor market, health, and marriage outcomes. The goal is to examine whether these early educational gains persist through time, and if they translate into labor market or fertility impacts as the children enter adulthood. If there are strong links between child health gains (from deworming) and adult human capital formation and poverty, the results of the proposed study may justify increased investment in child health and nutrition programs.

Evaluation Strategy

The study involves a rigorous system of tracking survey respondents within Kenya, in order to gather information for those individuals who have moved out of Busia District, the original study area. 7,500 young adults, 13-21 years old, were included in the sample. We build on an existing database of educational, health, and nutritional outcomes for school children in western Kenya (collected from 1998-2002), and extend it for an additional six years, in order to estimate the impact of improved child health and nutrition on long-run life outcomes. The resulting dataset - the Kenyan Life Panel Survey (KLPS) - will contain unique longitudinal educational, labor market, health, nutritional, demographic, and cognitive information for 6,800 children over ten years (1998-2008).

Large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-use longitudinal (panel) household datasets running over ten years are very rare in less developed countries, and particularly in Africa, and there are many possible research uses for the dataset that do not rely on the deworming experiment. For instance, the KLPS panel dataset will be well-suited to examine the effect of a parent death on the life outcomes of surviving orphan children. The issue of orphan welfare is especially relevant in Kenya - and many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa - where HIV/AIDS deaths have led to a sharp increase in orphans. We plan to make the complete KLPS dataset publicly available at no cost to other investigators by the end of the project.