A decade-long Wharton study in Zambia has found that a short course helped girls stay in school, delay marriage, and deliver strong returns on public funding at low cost.
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Can teaching teenage girls how to negotiate help them stay in school, marry later, and form more equal relationships? The answer appears to be yes—and those gains add up to strong economic returns for each dollar of public spending.
In 2013, Corinne Low, business economics and public policy professor at Penn’s Wharton School, introduced a negotiation skills course for eighth-grade girls in low-income areas of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. A decade on, those who took part had stayed in school longer, delayed sex and marriage, wed partners closer to their own age, and held less traditional views about gender roles.
Each girl gained about 0.23 more years of schooling, with gains that generate significant economic value over time. As it is too early to see the impact on their earnings, the authors estimated the payoff using evidence from a study linking education to later-life outcomes in Ghana: about $6.60 in benefits for every dollar spent.
“The key thing that was unique about our negotiation curriculum is that it aimed to give agency to girls in a position of disempowerment,” Low says. “The problem with many traditional empowerment programs is that they presume girls have a power to change their own lives that doesn’t actually exist.”
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