A new paper Cycling to School finds that bicycles are even better than cash transfers (HT: Marginal Revolution).

We find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls’ enrolment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia, suggesting that the coordinated provision of bicycles to girls may have generated externalities beyond the cash value of the program, including improved safety from girls cycling to school in groups, and changes in patriarchal social norms that proscribed female mobility outside the village, which inhibited female secondary school participation.

Not to ring by own bicycle bell, but I argued/intuited something similar for South Sudan back in 2005 (eight long years ago… where has the time gone?) in a short opinion piece on the Joint Assessment Mission report for Forced Migration Review:

Why not give away the $8bn?  When we consider that reconstruction spending is to target around 20 million marginalised Sudanese (of a total population of around 32 million) then you have spending of about $160 per person. After subtracting modest bureaucratic, consultancy and other delivery costs, this amounts to an annual payment of $150 for each poor person in Sudan for the next few years. Most poor people would undoubtedly prefer to receive such a sum as an income supplement rather than as a bundle of services. Why did the JAM authors assume that they could plan more wisely, and government counterparts in the GoS or SPLM could spend more effectively, than poor citizens in Bahr al-Ghazal or the Nuba Mountains or the Red Sea Hills? Why should we not trust Sudanese to make strategic and livelihoods-enhancing choices – a farmer to buy a younger and stronger donkey, parents to send their children to a better school, or a tea-seller to invest in another set of tea glasses?
It is disappointing that no consideration seems to have been given to an income support scheme, at the least for elderly women and families with school-age children. Numerous studies have shown that these programmes can be just as effective as government spending, and they have ripple effects throughout the private sector.  Education and roads are at the core of the JAM budget. One has to ask whether the private sector cannot manage education successfully, especially in the south where Christian missionaries and NGOs are more than willing to subsidise schooling. Everybody likes the idea of building roads. But the poor, in Sudan and elsewhere, know that their benefits go disproportionately to the rich. No doubt they would rather have bicycles, yet bicycles merit no mention at all in the JAM documents. As Sudan rebuilds, there is a real danger that the smart and the rich will take advantage of public investment, while everyone else stays at the bottom of the well.

It is good to see the emphasis validated.  Sad, too, because the hyper-governmentalized vision that triumphed in South Sudan (apex: giraffe shaped new capital city) will take the new country (in a John Kerry “It’s a guarantee” kind of way) not to Rwanda but to C.A.R.   In Burkina Faso, BTW, bicycles are fast becoming second-hand news, and what everyone now wants is an Apsonic  motorized rickshaw.