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El Salvador: Addressing Poverty and Economic Development
The government of El Salvador, with financial and technical support from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), implemented an initiative to address poverty and encourage economic development in El Salvador's Northern Zone, which has been marginalized for decades. The initiative had two components: (1) human development, and (2) productive development.
For the human development component, Mathematica evaluated four programs: (1) a scholarship program for technical high school and vocational students to increase their enrollment, persistence, and completion of technical secondary and post-secondary education; (2) strengthening of selected technical high schools, which affects whether youth can gain marketable skills and improve opportunities for postsecondary education, employment, and earnings; (3) improvement of a vocational institute to increase the supply of qualified students to meet the needs of a growing and diversifying economy; and (4) an informal skills development program focused on short-term training for high-risk youth that cannot attend formal education classes.
Within the productive development component, we evaluated programs that provide (1) technical assistance and training to support to micro-, small-, and medium-size producers in agricultural and nonagricultural commercial activities; (2) material and technical assistance to help transform productive practices on farms to higher-profit activities; and (3) financial support services to micro-, small-, and medium-size entrepreneurs in agricultural and nonagricultural commercial activities.
We worked with local and government agencies to design a survey to collect information about key outcomes for technical high school students. Survey information included socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics, as well as key study outcomes (graduation and employment). In addition, we used administrative records collected by the El Salvador Ministry of Education for measuring other outcomes, such as persistence rates. We designed surveys for evaluating the impact of the scholarship program and informal skills development program, as well as an in-depth case study of the improvement of a vocational institute. We collaborated with local and governmental agencies on a survey measure key outcomes for the productive development component: business income, job creation, the household income of program beneficiaries, and the employment rate in the communities where beneficiaries reside.