When Your Bootstraps Are Not Enough: How Demand and Supply Interact to Generate Learning in Settings of Extreme Poverty
In settings of extreme poverty, how do demand and supply combine to produce child learning? In rural Gambia, caregivers with high aspirations for their children's future, measured before children start school, invest substantially more than others in children’s education. Despite this, essentially no children are literate or numerate three years later. When villages receive a highly impactful, teacher-focused supply-side intervention, however, children of high-aspirations caregivers are 25 percent more likely to achieve literacy and numeracy than others in the same village. We estimate patterns of substitutability and complementarity between demand and supply in generating learning that change with skill difficulty.
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