Does Gender-Based Awareness Campaign Improve Girls’ Educational and Learning Outcomes? Empirical Evidence from India

In 2015, the Government of India launched Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP), a flagship gender-based awareness campaign program, to promote girls’ survival and education in India. The existing literature has a dearth of rigorous empirical evidence on the impact of this program on girls’ well-being. This study fills this gap in the literature. We examine the impact of the BBBP program on girls’ educational and learning outcomes. Using data from multiple large nationally representative surveys, we estimate the impact of the BBBP program by employing difference-in-differences framework. We do not find any statistically significant impact of the program on girls’ enrollment, their grade completion, and girl-specific educational expenditure. Our empirical results also suggest limited impact of the BBBP program on girls’ learning outcomes. These results are robust to alternative empirical specifications. We also examine heterogeneity of our results across different age-cohorts in rural and urban India as well as states with disparate levels of economic development. Furthermore, we triangulate some of our quantitative results using qualitative data collected from school teachers and parents of girl children.