Burkina Faso: Impact Evaluation Design and Implementation for BRIGHT 1 and 2

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) sponsored the “Burkinabé Response to Improve Girls’ Chances to Succeed,” or BRIGHT program, to improve the educational outcomes of children in Burkina Faso. Its primary focus was girls, and it was implemented in 132 villages. The first phase of the program (BRIGHT I) operated from 2005 to 2008 under the Burkina Faso Threshold Program (TP) and consisted of constructing primary schools with three classrooms and implementing a set of complementary interventions. To continue the success of BRIGHT I, the government of Burkina Faso extended it, using $28.8 million in compact funding. This second phase of BRIGHT (BRIGHT II) was implemented from 2009 to September 2012 and consisted of constructing three additional classrooms for grades 4 through 6 in the original 132 villages and continuing the complementary interventions begun during the first three years of the program. BRIGHT was implemented by a consortium of NGOs–Plan International, Catholic Relief Services, Tin Tua, and the Forum for African Women Educationalists–under the supervision of USAID.

Mathematica and its partners conducted a series of rigorous impact evaluations of the BRIGHT program to assess the impact of the program after three, seven, and ten years of implementation. All three evaluations examined impacts on school enrollment, test scores, and child labor. Additionally, the 7-year evaluation examined impacts on child health and the 10-year evaluation examined impacts on young adult outcomes.