Motivation
In Benin, secondary school tuition payments impose substantial financial strain on households, often leading to late or incomplete payments that result in students being sent home or barred from exams. These disruptions are especially consequential for girls, whose education is frequently deprioritized when resources are scarce. Many parents rely on continuous saving to pay school fees, reflecting irregular income streams and the need to accumulate small amounts over time. However, these savings are vulnerable to competing household needs—such as food, health expenses, or transportation—which can divert funds intended for future tuition installments and generate repeated payment delays and school absences. This study addresses these barriers by introducing a mobile money–based tuition payment system delivered through an ed-tech application, implemented in partnership with Revelateur Benin SA. The platform allows parents to monitor their child’s academic progress and behavior while enabling small, incremental tuition payments to be made digitally and directly to schools. Schools are also encouraged to accept incremental payments on site for parents who prefer not to use the application. By facilitating frequent, low-value payments and reducing the risk that earmarked tuition funds are absorbed by competing needs, the intervention aims to ease liquidity constraints, reduce payment delays, limit school absences, and improve educational outcomes—particularly for girls at greater risk of dropout during periods of financial stress.
Objective
The study examines whether digitizing tuition payments improves parents’ ability to pay school fees on time and in full, and whether these effects translate into better attendance and academic performance—especially for girls, whose schooling is often more vulnerable to financial shocks. A central question is whether flexible, incremental mobile payments disproportionately benefit girls. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial across 50 low-cost private secondary schools in Benin’s Atlantique, Zou, and Ouémé regions, focusing on students in Grades 9 and 10. For one academic year, access to the SuccesSco ed-tech application will be subsidized in all participating schools. Schools will be randomly assigned to treatment or control. In the 25 treatment schools, parents will receive full access to SuccesSco, including parental engagement features and the ability to make small, incremental tuition payments directly to schools. In the 25 control schools, parents will access the parental engagement features only, with tuition continuing to be paid through existing in-person methods. The evaluation combines school administrative data on payments, attendance, and academic performance with transaction-level data from SuccesSco and parent surveys, allowing us to assess both behavioral responses to digital payments and downstream effects on student outcomes and household financial stress.
Proposed impact
This research will generate actionable evidence for policymakers, educators, and financial service providers on whether mobile money can reduce financial barriers to secondary education and improve student outcomes. For implementers, the findings will inform the design of scalable school finance systems that lower administrative burdens, improve revenue collection, and reduce classroom disruptions caused by unpaid fees. By explicitly examining gender-differentiated impacts, the study will also contribute to strategies aimed at safeguarding girls’ education during periods of financial strain. For researchers, the project advances the literature on financial inclusion by linking digital payment innovations to concrete education outcomes, rather than access alone. If successful, the intervention offers a replicable model for using digital finance to support education financing in resource-constrained settings across Sub-Saharan Africa and similar contexts.
Photo by Camille KOSSOKO
