Vocational Education Voucher Delivery

This report describes the ongoing Technical and Vocational Vouchers Program (TVVP) in Kenya and provides early results from the intervention. Implementation began in 2008 with the recruitment of approximately 2,160 out-of-school youths (ranging in age from roughly 18 to 30). Study participants were drawn from the Kenya Life Panel Survey, an unusual on-going panel dataset of detailed educational, health, and cognitive information for over 7,000 adolescents in western Kenya. Of the 2,160 youths that applied to the TVVP, a random half were awarded a voucher for vocational training, while the other half served as the control group. Of the voucher winners, a random half were awarded a voucher that could only be used in public (government) institutions, while the other half received a voucher that could be used in either private or public institutions. The project also included a cross-cutting information intervention, which exposed a randomly selected half of all treatment and control individuals to information about the actual returns to vocational education. This report focuses on program take-up, the demand for vocational training and the impacts of the information intervention on institution and course selection, participant attendance, the short-term impacts of training on labor market expectations and outcomes for a representative subset of program participants, and training center characteristics. The report also provides some suggestive evidence on the supply-side impacts of the program. The vocational training vouchers and impact evaluation activities to date were primarily financed by the World Bank through the Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program (BNPP) and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), with additional assistance received for past or future evaluation activities from the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan (GAP), the International Growth Centre, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3IE) / Global Development Network, and the National Institutes for Health. We are grateful to Shobhana Sosale for her encouragement, support, and useful comments and suggestions throughout this project. We are also grateful to David Evans, Markus Goldstein, Arianna Legovini and Michael Mills for their support. Lisa Chen, Lauren Falcao, Jonas Hjort, Maryam Janani, Andrew Fischer Lees, Jamie McCasland, Owen Ozier, Adina Rom and Sebastian Stumpner provided exceptional research, managerial, organizational, and implementation assistance. The project was implemented and managed in collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action-Kenya (IPAK). We are grateful for the superb effort of the field staff led by Blastus Bwire and Benard Onyango, and the management and support staff at IPAK.