How Much are Multisectoral Programs Worth? A New Method with an Application to School Meals

Abstract

Poverty reduction and nutrition are often joint outcomes of many public policies and programs which have education as their primary outcome. Quantification of overall benefits for these programs is challenging. We develop a method to incorporate distributional benefits from poverty reduction into standard education economic evaluations. We apply this to a RCT evaluating school feeding in Ghana. We first map effect sizes from the RCT in learning-adjusted years of schooling. We convert these into long-term monetary gains, to which we then add the distributional benefits stemming from the program under different scenarios of redistributive preferences. We show that the program has substantial economic gains. While these primarily stem from improved human capital, depending on different scenarios up to half of total benefits are driven by poverty reduction. Beyond school meals, our methodology is relevant to programs that have multiple benefits covering both human capital and equity.

Keywords: Program evaluation, redistribution, fiscal policy, cost-benefit analysis, school feeding, Ghana.