EDUCATION FINANCING AND SUPPORT SERVICES
The education financing and support services study examines the impact of providing loans and/or quality enhancing education products and support services (ESPS) to private schools. Following on from the private school grants study, we use an RCT design to examine whether a combination of financially sustainable loans and ESPS products can impact school-level outcomes and student test scores. While there is no published academic paper for this study yet, there are two papers in progress. See our work on the impact of both financing and ESPS on school closure here and a deeper dive on the take-up and impact of ESPS here.
About the Data
Timeline
We conduct seven rounds of data collection between October 2014 and January 2020.
Schools are first administered a screener survey to determine interest in financial products and various school characteristics. One month after the screener, schools are administered a baseline survey followed by three follow-up surveys over the next five years.
These surveys start at baseline then take place annually for two years (referred to as midline I and midline II), concluding with a final endline survey that was completed in early 2020.
Data Contents
General School Survey: These surveys collect information on school characteristics, including expenditures, revenues, fees, enrollment, and other school-level financial and practical characteristics. The respondent was most often the head teacher or the school owner.
School Owner Survey: These surveys were conducted with the school owner whenever possible and asked questions about their practices, management style, funding sources, ESPS markets in the area, as well as some basic information on the school owner’s household.
Endline Survey: This survey includes additional questions about the school owner’s financial activities beyond the school, such as other businesses and agriculture, as well as an extended household survey. At the endline we also revisit school owners of schools that had closed at some point during the study to administer the business, agriculture, and extended household sections of the survey.
Sampling Summary
Our sampling frame consists of private schools in three districts of Punjab: Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Sialkot. We restrict our sample to private schools. We first conduct a listing exercise of schools in these districts, after which, we visit a total of 3,832 schools of which 3,449 consent to the screener and 1,261 screen into the study based on whether they declare an interest in seeking financing. Only schools with some degree of interest in financial products are screened into the study.
Our final study sample, after further pre-randomization phone calls confirming schools’ interest in financial products, and consents for the baseline survey and randomization, is 815 schools.
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Data Use Notice: The public data has been cleaned to make it accessible to any researcher unfamiliar with the project. As there is no published academic paper associated with this dataset yet, this dataset will be updated when the paper is released.
For most variables, the data is clean and consistent. However, some inconsistencies may remain from measurement or processing errors that cannot be explained from field records at this point. For these remaining cases, it is the user’s responsibility to apply corrections as they see fit.
Released public data is anonymized and doesn’t contain any personally identifiable information to protect the privacy of research subjects. By downloading and using the data, researchers commit to not making any attempts at re-identifying individuals from the microdata. Doing so would dramatically jeopardize the accessibility of this dataset and other datasets in the future, as privacy of research subjects is of paramount importance for ethical and transparent research.
Required Citation: By downloading the data, users also commit to citing the data documentation report using the following citation:
Andrabi, Das, Khwaja, and Ozyurt (2022), The Education Financing and Support Services Dataset, 2014-2020, version 11-2022, released November 18th 2022