CSAE Lunchtime Seminar 'Can Foundational Skills Expand Agency Under Severe Constraints? Experimental Evidence from Girls Facing Educational Exclusion in Afghanistan'
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Michael Callen
- Series
- Suzanne George
- Location
- Manor Road Building - Skills Lab, Skills Lab, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
With Noam Angrist (Oxford), Michael Callen (LSE), Anaya Dam (Oxford), Claire Cullen (Youth Impact), Oeindrila Dube (University of Chicago), Saipremnath Muthukumaran (LSE) Abstract An estimated 127 million school-age children in fragile settings remain out of school. This deprivation restricts the foundational skills—like reading and writing—needed to navigate everyday tasks independently. We investigate whether remote, low-cost phone tutoring can expand the basic capabilities of individuals facing extreme institutional constraints. We conduct a randomized controlled trial involving 2,399 girls across 26 Afghan provinces—a context of de jure educational exclusion. We evaluate an 8-week, one-on-one tutoring intervention delivered via mobile phone using a "Teaching at the Right Level" approach. To our knowledge, this is the first randomized evaluation of mobile phone-delivered foundational literacy instruction, alongside numeracy, which we designed and implemented in this setting to assess effects on agency. The program increased combined literacy and numeracy by ~0.14 SD ($p < 0.01$) and improved adjacent cognitive skills by ~0.12 SD ($p < 0.01$). To identify shifts in agency, we develop and deploy an incentivized "Literacy Dependence Task" that measures reliance on information intermediaries to interpret textual data. Tutored girls are 3.5 percentage points (13.1%) more likely to navigate skills-gated tasks independently, with gains concentrated among girls who were illiterate at baseline (+7.4 pp). We contrast these results with a second treatment arm involving weekly structured conversations with teachers without formal instruction. While both interventions improve social capabilities (0.15 SD, $p < 0.01$) and well-being, the agency gains are unique to the tutoring arm, suggesting that foundational skills—rather than social interaction alone—drive the expansion of autonomy. Finally, we find that the intervention increased caregiver beliefs in child capabilities (+5.0 pp, $p < 0.01$) and shifted household resource allocation toward education in a real-stakes task. Together, our results show that foundational skills can increase agency along several dimensions even when structural constraints prohibit formal participation in public life.
Add to Calendar