Early education opportunities
Can supporting pre-school education improve educational outcomes for the children and business development for the mothers? A new FAIR project in Uganda will address these issues.
The project «Child care for childhood and business development» has recieved a grant of 10 million NOK from the Research Council of Norway (NORGLOBAL-2).
The project team:
NHH Professor Kjetil Bjorvatn at FAIR, Assistant Professor Vincent Somville (also NHH), Wameq Raza (BRAC in Uganda), Selim Gulesci (Bocconi University) and Lore Vandewalle (IHEID).
Two key research questions
The project will focus on childcare in Uganda to free up time for mothers to have their own businesses.
Can supporting pre-school education improve (i) educational outcomes for the children and (ii) business development for the mothers? These are the two key research questions in this project.
Other studies have found that childcare has a positive impact on children's development and mothers’ employment decisions. No study, however, has explored these questions in Sub-Saharan Africa, and very few have used a randomized control methodology.
Field experiment
The researchers will set up a field experiment in collaboration with the development organization Brac Uganda. They offer incentives to female entrepreneurs with small children in order to send their children to quality childcare. Then they will explore impact of this treatment on both the children's development and on the business development of the mother-entrepreneurs.
In this way, the project is ground breaking both in the choice of geographical context and in the choice of method used to investigate these questions. Moreover, the researchers say, the project adds to the literature by exploring possible interaction effects between childcare and business training for business development.
Finally, it addresses potential spill over and general equilibrium effects of the intervention, which are usually ignored by business development and job creation programs.