The Impact of Vocational Education on Incomes, Health and Wellbeing in Kenya

职业教育对肯尼亚收入、健康和福祉的影响

• 批准号: 8117748
• 负责人: EDWARD ANDREW MIGUEL
• 金额: $ 7.37万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-08-01 至 2013-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8117748
• 关键词: Activities of Daily Living; Address; Affect; Africa; African; Area; Back; Birth; Characteristics; Child; Child health care; Cities; Cognitive; Communities; Country; Data; Data Collection; Data Set; Developing Countries; Development; Drops; Economics; Education; Educational Intervention; Effectiveness; Employment; Etiology; Evaluation; Future; Government; Grant; Happiness; Health; Health Care Seeking Behavior; Health Sciences; Health education; Household; Income; Individual; Infant Mortality; Institution; Intervention; Investments; Kenya; Life; Living Standards; Local Government; Marketing; Marriage; Marriage Ages; Medicine; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Occupations; Out-Migrations; Outcome; Patient Self-Report; Personal Satisfaction; Population; Primary Schools; Private Sector; Psyche structure; Public Health Education; Public Sector; Randomized; Remittance; Reporting; Research; Research Design; Respondent; Running; Sample Size; Sampling; Sampling Studies; Schools; Secondary Schools; Social Sciences; Spouses; Support Groups; Surveys; Testing; Time; Training; Training Programs; Underemployment; Unemployment; United States National Institutes of Health; Violence; Vocational Education; Wages; Weight Gain; Work; World Bank; Youth; aged; authority; beneficiary; boys; design; education evaluation; follow-up; girls; health economics; human capital; improved; innovation; insight; interdisciplinary approach; migration; nutrition education; programs; prospective; public health relevance; reproductive; research study; school health; social; voucher; young adult

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Youth unemployment is one of the most pressing social and economic problems facing less developed countries. Kenya, like many African countries, suffers from high youth unemployment. Yet little is known about how best to improve human capital and job prospects for young adults not on the academic schooling track in less developed countries. Vocational education is one promising avenue for addressing the problem. This project will evaluate impacts of a vocational education voucher program among Kenyan youth, using a randomized evaluation design together with an innovative longitudinal (panel) dataset, the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS). In particular, the project will explore whether subsidized vocational training can enable the unemployed and those with little formal schooling to move into new and higher-paying occupations, improving their living standards, health and well-being. The results of this study will inform governments, policymakers and donors on the economic and health impacts of vocational education, allowing them to improve the effectiveness of such programs in Africa. A subset of the study sample benefited from an earlier school health intervention, further allowing us to estimate the interaction of youth health and education investments on life outcomes. Finally, the unusual panel dataset, which tracks respondents wherever they move within East Africa, will provide new insights into how human capital investments affect out-migration decisions and remittances back to the sending area, allowing estimation of the "returns" to public education and health investments from the perspective of a local government authority. The prospective project design helps overcome the key methodological problem of establishing the direction of causality between educational attainment and health, labor market and other life outcomes, which makes most existing empirical studies on this topic difficult to interpret. This research design, large sample size, and interdisciplinary approach will make the results particularly useful across the social sciences and health sciences. Furthermore, the research will utilize the uniquely detailed background information for individuals in the KLPS sample to pin down the effectiveness of vocational training for groups of youths with specific and well-defined characteristics, a crucial piece of evidence for policymakers designing vocational training programs that almost always target subsets of the youth population. For example, a subset of the youths in the sample are in better health because they were part of a randomly chosen group of KLPS children that received deworming medicine in primary school. Higher returns to subsequent education may be a substantial, though usually unexplored, benefit of child health interventions in poor countries. The unique situation of this project - combining a randomized health intervention with a subsequent randomized education intervention - will provide some of the first rigorous evidence on this important issue. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The design of this study permits us to examine the health and labor market impacts of educational attainment, using a randomized vocational education intervention among over 2,150 Kenyan youth. The prospective project design helps overcome the key methodological problem of establishing the direction of causality between educational attainment and health and labor market outcomes, which makes most existing empirical studies on this topic difficult to interpret. A subset of the study sample also benefited from an earlier school health intervention, allowing us to estimate the interaction of youth health and education investments on life outcomes.

描述(申请人提供)：青年失业是欠发达国家面临的最紧迫的社会和经济问题之一。像许多非洲国家一样，肯尼亚的青年失业率很高。然而，对于如何最好地改善欠发达国家非学历年轻人的人力资本和就业前景，人们知之甚少。职业教育是解决这一问题的一个有希望的途径。该项目将使用随机评估设计和创新的纵向(小组)数据集--肯尼亚生活小组调查(KLP)，评估肯尼亚青年职业教育券计划的影响。特别是，该项目将探讨有补贴的职业培训是否能够使失业者和几乎没有受过正规教育的人进入新的、报酬更高的职业，改善他们的生活水平、健康和福祉。这项研究的结果将使各国政府、政策制定者和捐助者了解职业教育对经济和健康的影响，使他们能够提高此类计划在非洲的有效性。研究样本的一个子集受益于早期的学校健康干预，进一步使我们能够估计青年健康和教育投资对生活结果的交互作用。最后，这一不同寻常的面板数据集跟踪了受访者在东非的所到之处，它将为人力资本投资如何影响迁出决定和汇款回流地区提供新的见解，使之能够从地方政府当局的角度估计公共教育和卫生投资的“回报”。前瞻性项目设计有助于克服关键的方法论问题，即确定教育程度与健康、劳动力市场和其他生活结果之间的因果关系方向，这使得现有的大多数关于这一主题的实证研究很难解释。这种研究设计、大样本量和跨学科方法将使结果在社会科学和卫生科学中特别有用。此外，这项研究将利用KLP样本中个人独特的详细背景信息，确定针对具有特定和明确特征的青年群体的职业培训的有效性，这是政策制定者设计几乎总是针对青年人口亚群的职业培训计划的关键证据。例如，样本中的一部分年轻人健康状况较好，因为他们是随机选择的一组KLPS儿童中的一部分，这些儿童在小学接受了驱虫药物。较高的后续教育回报可能是贫穷国家儿童健康干预措施的一个重大好处，尽管通常没有人探索过。该项目的独特情况--将随机化健康干预与随后的随机化教育干预相结合--将在这一重要问题上提供一些最初的严格证据。 公共卫生相关性：这项研究的设计允许我们通过对2150多名肯尼亚青年进行随机职业教育干预，来检查受教育程度对健康和劳动力市场的影响。前瞻性项目设计有助于克服关键的方法论问题，即确定教育程度与健康和劳动力市场结果之间的因果关系方向，这使得现有的大多数关于这一主题的实证研究难以解释。研究样本的一个子集也受益于早期的学校健康干预，使我们能够估计青年健康和教育投资对生活结果的交互作用。