One popular approach to improving both enrollment and attendance is to reduce the costs of schooling, either by eliminating school fees or paying for necessities such as school uniforms. In Kenya, where baseline attendance was around 86%, giving free uniforms to primary school students increased daily attendance by 6.4 percentage points, raising student participation by 0.71 years per $100 spent 3.  A program which offered scholarships to cover the school fees for high-performing girls in Kenyan primary schools caused an additional 0.27 years of schooling per $100 spent 4.

In areas where school attendance and enrollment are already high, often because schools are already free, offering money to all students who regularly attend school may not be as cost-effective. In Mexico the PROGRESA program offered a series of cash grants to poor families, conditional on their children’s attendance at schools, causing significant increases in enrollment 11.  But because all poor children were subsidized, and their baseline level of attendance was already 90%, the program was quite expensive per additional year of schooling attained. Additionally, because the program was also used as a means to transfer cash to the poor, and price levels in Mexico are much higher than in a country like Kenya, the transfer cost was quite significant. It is important to note, however, that the program achieved outcomes other than student attendance, such as improving nutritional status and getting money into the hands of poor families.

Other programs seek to communicate the benefits of schooling, particularly increased wages for graduates, which families may not be aware of. In the Dominican Republic, boys were given information on how much more they could earn with a secondary school education, and they increased their attendance by 5 percentage points 10. This program was expensive to implement, because it used individual meetings with boys to communicate information and targeted only a few students within each school, for experimental purposes. However, a similar program in Madagascar also caused significant increases in attendance with a much less intensive, and thus much less expensive, program 1. All parents in primary schools were invited to attend an informational session, where they were given statistics on the average monthly earnings of local people with different levels of education. Because the only costs of this program were the one-time meeting and the parents’ time to attend, the ratio of benefits to costs was extremely high: an additional 20.7 years of education were attained for every $100 spent.

Absence can also be reduced by addressing factors that prevent children from attending school, such as health problems. Treating children for intestinal worms that can make them tired, anemic, and unable to attend school, led to an additional 13.9 years of education for every $100 spent in a small-scale experiment in Kenya 2. Recent large-scale deworming programs have cost less than 50 cents per child per year (less than the program piloted in Kenya), suggesting an even higher level of cost-effectiveness. Another program, targeting anemia, gave iron fortification to preschoolers in India, causing an additional 2.7 years of education per $100 spent 5. But it is not always obvious which health issues are the ones that are actually preventing children from attending school. In Nepal, girls reported missing only half a day of schooling per year due to menstruation, and the provision of menstrual cups to address this supposed barrier had no impact on attendance 9.

It is important to note that attendance at school is only the first step - the quality of education, including the presence of capable teachers and the use of an appropriate curriculum, is key to improving learning outcomes. Interestingly, students do not appear to change their demand for schooling in response to changes in schooling quality, at least over the short term. For instance, implementing a camera monitoring system to reduce teacher absence in India 6 and providing a computer-assisted curriculum 7 both increased learning outcomes, but these programs did not affect student attendance. The different goals, of increasing time in school and improving education quality, may require different approaches.