Jere Behrman, School of Arts & Sciences Education and Gender Attitudes among Adolescents in Rural India

Despite India’s unprecedented economic growth in recent years, Indian children face a series of developmental challenges, such as poor health and education, and acute gender gaps. Improving health, education and gender attitudes will improve economic and social outcomes for both the current generation as well as the next through intergenerational transmissions. The Magic Bus Foundation (MBF), which we are partnering with and studying in this project, follows the theory that children learn best while playing. This theory serves as the basis of their award winning activity-based curriculum developed to improve gender equality, healthy schooling, and personality. The interrelated impact areas of the program ensure holistic development for children. The program is large and expanding rapidly. Our objective is to use rich quantitative and qualitative data in an experimental design to assess MBF’s sports-based curriculum program’s impact on adolescents’ health and hygienic practices, schooling enrollment and learning outcomes, leadership, gender equality, and personality development using three-rounds of panel data collected over 5 years. The results from the evaluation will be used to guide long-term scale-up of the program in other districts with the potential to implement similar programs in other parts of Asia.