Nudges to improve learning and gender parity: Supporting parent engagement and Ghana’s educational response to Covid-19 using mobile phones

While recent evidence from Brazil and Ivory Coast suggests that SMS messages to nudge parents' engagement in their children's education have large effects on educational outcomes, the Covid-19 pandemic raises additional concerns. In particular, learning deficits and school dropouts are likely to increase following school shutdowns, especially among vulnerable populations such as older girls who need to work to support their families or due to early marriage, childbearing and adolescent pregnancy. A further knowledge gap relates to the optimal period of exposure to the nudges, which is critical to scale-up. This study investigates whether sending nudges to parents can improve parental engagement in child education and broader development across child age groups and gender, in the low-resource setting of Ghana, by randomly assigning whether parents receive two different versions of nudges, with one version including content promoting girls’ education and addressing some common stereotypes around gender, and whether the duration of these different modalities vary between three and six months.