Country context
From 2005 through 2008, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) funded a two-year
Threshold Program (TP) to increase educational attainment of girls in Burkina Faso by
constructing primary schools with classrooms for grades 1 through 3 and providing
complementary interventions. The program, known as the Burkinabé Response to Improve Girl’s
Chances to Succeed, or BRIGHT, was implemented in 132 rural villages in the 10 provinces in
Burkina Faso with the lowest enrollment rates among girls. The initial short-term impact
evaluation of the BRIGHT program used data from a 2008 follow-up survey (Levy et al. 2009)
and found positive impacts on school enrollment and test scores for both boys and girls.
Encouraged by the positive impacts but concerned that the impacts would be short-lived, the
government of Burkina Faso extended the BRIGHT program in 2008, using $28.8 million in
compact funding.1 The second phase of BRIGHT was implemented from 2009 to September
2012 and involved the construction of three additional classrooms for grades 4 through 6 in the
original 132 villages and continuing the complementary interventions provided during the
program’s first three years. During the TP, the initial phase of the program was known as
BRIGHT I; the extension has been known as BRIGHT II.
2. Objectives of this report
MCC hired Mathematica Policy Research to conduct rigorous independent impact
evaluations of BRIGHT using two additional rounds of data collection. Because BRIGHT II is a
continuation of BRIGHT I and is implemented in the same villages, the evaluation can only
assess the impacts of the two phases (BRIGHT I and II) combined. In this report, we discuss
Mathematica’s plan to conduct a mid-term and a longer-term impact evaluation of the BRIGHT
program that started in 2005 as BRIGHT I and continued in the same villages as BRIGHT II
after 2008. The mid-term impact evaluation will be based on data collected in 2012, 7 years after
the start of the intervention and the longer-term impact evaluation will be based on data collected
in the 2015, 10 years after the start of the intervention. Here, we outline the evaluation design
and methodology, mid-term and longer-term impact and cost analyses plan, and data collection
strategies for the two follow-up surveys. However, at the time of this report, implementation of
all the BRIGHT intervention components have already been completed. The 2012 follow-up
survey has also been conducted and the mid-term report has been drafted based on this data. In
addition, the 2015 follow-up survey has been conducted as well.