Evaluating the Effectiveness of Alternative Interventions to Reduce Teenage Childbearing in Latin America
Since July 2009, the PEP Latin America Office - hosted at El Grupo de Analisis para El Desarrollo (GRADE) in Lima, Peru - has been collaborating with the Gender and Diversity Unit of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in a project that aims to promote the reduction of teen pregnancy in Latin America.
Together, they ran a call for proposals of research projects that evaluate the impact of promising interventions to reduce or prevent teenage childbearing.
Taking advantage of PEP’s experience in advanced research methodologies, the studies would resort to the PIERI’s analytical tools for rigorous impact evaluation. From this call, two proposals were selected and granted funding to conduct their impact evaluations. They were evaluated by a selection committee formed by two members of the IADB (Suzanne Duryea and Gabriela Vega), Habiba Djebbari, director of the PIERI program and Martin Valdivia, director of the PEP Latin American office.
The winner proposals were the following:
- “Evaluating policies to reduce teenage childbearing in Bogota, Colombia: the effect of policies reducing costs of education faced by households” - led by Dario Maldonado from Universidad del Rosario, Bogota.
- “Teenage Pregnancy and Education Expectations in Chile”- led by Claudia Martinez from Fundación Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad de Chile.
The research teams attended a start-up workshop in December 2009 at the IADB headquarters in Washington DC, where they met the selection committee - by then turned into an advisory committee - to discuss their proposals and receive technical advice. By the end of December, they presented the adjusted versions of their research proposals. Interim versions of the reports were presented by the end of March, and the authors received comments from the consultative group. Final reports were submitted in September 2010.
Find out about their research findings and policy recommendations via their latest PEP publications:
Policy Brief 83 (Colombia); "Derived Impacts of Education Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: the Case of Teenage Pregnancy" (see also PEP news article)
More research results will soon be published as both working papers and policy briefs.