Thus, Peter Orazem considers three strategies that seem to offer the best evidence of success to date: nutrition supplements, offering information on returns to schooling, and conditional cash transfers for school attendance. All have been shown to succeed with benefits that exceed the costs.
It may seem surprising to focus on nutrition to achieve better schooling, but malnourished children learn poorly. Insuring proper nutrition when brain development is occurring makes a significant difference. The benefits are not just educational but also increase health and a child’s physical abilities (we saw investment in deworming recommended in the Copenhagen Consensus research on chronic disease, and nutritional interventions promoted in the paper on hunger.) Provision of nutrient supplements and anti-parasitic medicines is very inexpensive: In Kenya the cost of deworming a child can be as low as $3.50, with benefits 20 to 50 times higher.
Increasing the years a child spends in school simply by providing accurate information to kids and parents on the returns of educationschooling is another promising and relatively inexpensive intervention.