Overview

The Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS) is a longitudinal dataset of educational, health, demographic, socio-economic measures and other life outcomes for individuals who participated in human capital interventions as children, including the Primary School Deworming Project (PSDP) (which started in 1998, see Miguel and Kremer 2004) and the Girls’ Scholarship Program (GSP) (which started in 2001, see Kremer, Miguel and Thornton 2009). Launched in 2003, the KLPS is currently in its fifth round (2023-26), providing panel data covering over 25 years since the start of the earliest interventions. Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel were the pioneers leading the deworming project starting back in 1998, and together with co-authors they have published several long-run follow-ups of the original study.

Objectives

A leading objective of the KLPS has been to estimate the impacts of these randomized interventions on long-run life outcomes. To do so, KLPS survey instruments and data collection cover a wide range of topics and measures of interest across research disciplines, including economics, demography, political science, public health, epidemiology, African studies, and beyond. The resulting longitudinal dataset on thousands of individuals over nearly three decades has multiple uses beyond the estimation of program treatment effects. Since 2005, KLPS activities have been conducted in close collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).

Starting from KLPS-4, the project also began surveying the children of the original KLPS respondents. This linked sample has been designed to generate greater understanding of any causal intergenerational effects of the parents’ own health and education treatments on their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills, health, and other life outcomes. More than 15,000 people are tracked, with tracking rates above 80% across all survey rounds. The current KLPS-5 round also collects more detailed midlife data on cognition, health biomarkers, and information on many key risk factors for Alzheimer’s Disease and related forms of dementia (AD/ADRD). This will be an increasing focus of the project in planned future data collection rounds.

Research and Impact

KLPS data has already been utilized in dozens of academic publications and policy reports (see list here), with publications in many different scientific and disciplinary journals. One of the most high-profile lines of research resulting from KLPS is on the long-run impacts of deworming in Kenya, which has influenced school health programming in many countries – including in Kenya itself, as well as in India, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Pakistan – and has contributed to an evidence base that is used to justify mass deworming programs that have reached hundreds of millions of children per year over the last decade. The dataset is also designed to provide new insights into the evolution of cognition, health and economic circumstances throughout the life course as participants age.

Funding

Over the years, KLPS has received generous funding from various sources, including:

• U.S. National Institutes of Health (R01-TW05612, R01-HD044475, R01-HD090118, R03-HD064888, R01-HD108281, R01-AG077001)

• U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-0418110, SES-0962614)

• Givewell

• The World Bank

• University of California, Berkeley

• Berkeley Population Center

• Social Science Research Council

Research human subjects ethics approvals have been obtained from both academic and government institutions in Kenya and the United States.

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