Does a food for education program affect school outcomes? The Bangladesh case

The Food for Education (FFE) program was introduced to Bangladesh in 1993. This paper evaluates the effect of this program on school participation and duration of schooling using a household survey data collected in 2000, after 7 years of operation of the program. Using propensity score matching combined with difference-in-differences methodologies we estimate the average effect of FFE eligibility on the schooling outcomes. We found that the program is successful in that the eligible children on average have 15 to 27 per cent higher school participation rates, relative to their counterfactuals who were not but would have been eligible for the program. Conditional on school participation, participants also stay at school 0.7 to 1.05 years longer than their counterfactuals