Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

While many developing countries have reported gender gaps in education, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress and terminated the gender gap in secondary school enrollment through its national Female Stipend Program (FSP) in the 1990s. Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) like the FSP have become a popular development policy prescription, but the literature on CCTs in South Asia is surprisingly limited. A similar program to the FSP, the Female Secondary School Stipend, was implemented in the Punjab province of Pakistan in 2004 and had modest success, increasing secondary school enrollment for girls by 10%. This paper compares and contrasts the …