Does Nutrition‐Led Multifaceted Program Impact Adolescent Girls' Educational and Learning Outcomes? Evidence From India

While extensive literature is available on the impact of early childhood nutritional food program on human capital gains, little we know about the impact of targeted nutritious food provisioning at a later stage on human capital gains. This paper fills this gap in the literature. We examine the causal impact of the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls (SABLA), a nutrition-led multifaceted program for adolescent girls aged 11-18 years introduced by the central government in India in 2010, on girls' educational and learning outcomes. The implementation of this program provides us with enough variation in treatment. We glean data from multiple nationally representative datasets and employ difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal impact of the SABLA program. Our results indicate that the program significantly improved enrollment and basic learning outcomes, including reading ability and math skills. We attribute the salutary effects of the program to significant improvement in health status (BMI and weight) of the adolescent girls exposed to the program and increased child-specific educational expenditure. Our findings are consistent across different datasets, and robust to potential confounding factors, and alternative empirical specifications.