Abstract
Over the past two decades, sports programs have proliferated as a mode of engaging youth in development projects. Thousands of organizations, millions of participants, and hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in sports-based development programs each year. The underlying belief that sports promote socioemotional skills, improve psychological well-being, and foster traits that boost labor force productivity has provided motivation to expand funding and offerings of sport-for-development programs. We partnered with an international nongovernmental organization to randomly assign 1,200 young adults to a sports and life skills development program. While we do not see evidence of improved psychosocial outcomes or resilience, we do find evidence that the program caused a 0.12 standard deviation increase in labor force participation. Secondary analysis suggests that the effects are strongest among those likely to be most disadvantaged in the labor market.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 129-158 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | Economic Development and Cultural Change |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2021 |
Funding
We are grateful to Mercy Corps for its willingness to evaluate the program discussed in this paper. Without an openness to scrutiny and facilitation of sharing administrative data, this research would not have been possible. We thank Stephanie De Mel for her research assistance and T. Wordplee Marwolo, Joseph Kamara, Dackermue Dolo, Abel Welwean, and other field research staff of Innovations for Poverty Action for their hard work and dedication in carrying out data collection. We are grateful to Innovations for Poverty Action for assistance running the study. We thank the study participants for generously giving their time. We thank Chris Blattman, Julian Jamison, and Margaret Sheridan for sharing questionnaires. Guanghua Chi provided valuable contributions to the qualitative data analysis. This research was funded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (grant OW4/1094), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (award 90954-S-001), the International Growth Centre (grant 1-VCH-VSLE-VXXXX-51300), and Mercy Corps. Data are provided through Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ERSL7G). Contact the corresponding author, Sylvan Herskowitz, at [email protected].
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Development
- Economics and Econometrics
