Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment

Negotiation training given to 8^th grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, specifically reducing dropout rates in the 9^th grade during the transition to secondary school, with the largest impacts on school enrollment by the 11^th grade.

After tracking the girls’ enrollment levels and educational outcomes over the 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th grade, the study found that:

• Participation in a 2-week negotiation training in the 8th grade increases enrollment of girls in the 11th grade by 4.4 percentage points (10%).
• Furthermore, in the 11thgrade, being in the negotiation training also increased the probability from 25% to 29% of girls being enrolled in a higher quality “morning school” that requires higher scores on the national exam.
• Participating in a 2-week individualistic empowerment training without the negotiation skills in the 8th grade had positive but not statistically significant effects on enrollment.
• Providing more information about returns to education or health protection during the trainings had no effect on school enrollment or in morning school enrollment. Information alone appears to be insufficient to alter girls’ school enrollment outcomes in this context.

The study finds that it is possible to empower girls to change their educational outcomes through interpersonal skills, even in highly constrained environments. Teaching girls noncognitive interpersonal skills like negotiation appears to lead to greater human capital investment in part because these skills allow young women to become better advocates for themselves among differing household interests. The Zambian Ministry of Education has begun adapting elements from the negotiation training into the national life skills curriculum for all grade 8 students.

Using a randomized control trial study design, the researchers assigned 2,336 eight-grade girls in 29 co-ed public schools in Lusaka, Zambia to receive either the negotiation (n=801 girls), safe space (n=785 girls), or control (n=780 girls) treatment. An additional 12 schools (n=780 girls) served as “pure control” schools to assist in the measurement of spillovers to untreated girls. Everything was cross-randomized with an informational intervention to test other means of empowering girls. The negotiation treatment entailed a 2-week negotiation training while the safe space treatment entailed a 2-week individualistic empowerment training with female role models but without teaching negotiation skills. The information treatment provided more information about returns to education or health protection than the negotiation treatment. To measure the effects of the treatments, follow-up data was collected three to four months after the interventions. A lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted at the same time. The study tracked school enrollment and collected administrative data on the girls’ educational and pregnancy outcomes for three years. Short-term follow-up data was obtained through follow up surveys of the girls and their parents. The researchers also implemented a lab-in-the-field game designed to measure the effect of the girls using their negotiation skills with their parents in a controlled setting.