But what was driving these outcomes? Could covering the cost of school uniforms and tuition for these children during their nearly ten years of sponsorship mainly account for these impacts—or was it something else about being a sponsored child. We decided to ask Compassion what they thought made their program tick. Their response: “Try hope.” During their years of sponsorship, Compassion children spend an average of about 4,000 hours in after-school programming, much of which is devoted to nurturing their self-esteem and aspirations. So—we tried hope. In follow-up studies in Kenya, Bolivia, and Indonesia, we began to ask currently sponsored children about self-expectations: How far did they expect to reach in school? What did they hope and expect to be when they grew up?

In a follow-up study (using a similar IV strategy to the original) we find that the difference in educational and vocational aspirations between currently sponsored children and their counterfactuals roughly corresponded to the actual impacts we had found in adulthood after sponsored children had grown up. But if aspirations are important to development, a number of questions remain:

via Measuring Hope: Guest post by Bruce Wydick | Impact Evaluations.