In Brazil and Mexico, multi-billion dollar state-run social welfare programs, Bolsa Familia and Opportunidades pay poor families to achieve a threshold rate of school and health clinic attendance. In South Asia, municipal and state governments contribute to savings accounts for secondary-school girls to stem their otherwise high drop-out rate. A 2009 World Bank global review of conditional cash transfers (CCT) concluded that they have successfully “reduced poverty and encouraged parents to invest in the health and education of their children”.
What’s more, there seems to be a correlation between teenage sexual behavior and poverty. A review in Guttmacher Institute’s journal, International Family Planning Perspectives reported that “female adolescents from poor households are more likely than their wealthiest counterparts to have had sex, according to an analysis of nationally representative data from four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.” In a 2006 study reported in AIDS Education and Prevention, interviews with more than 600 South African adolescents showed that poor adolescents were more likely to have unhealthy parent-child relationships which made them more vulnerable to risky sexual behavior.
Clearly, something about having money prevents teenagers from having sex. However, until recently, no one had directly examined the effects of cash transfers on sexual behavior.
In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a two year randomized control trial in Malawi that examined the effects of cash transfers on schoolgirls’ (self-reported) sexual activity. Roughly 4,000 12-22 year old girls were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group where they either did or did not receive money in exchange for attending school 80 percent of the time and reporting on their sexual activity, among other behaviors. The payment, which covered about 15 percent of monthly household expenses, was split between the girl and her family. The researchers monitored school attendance and the girls reported on their sexual activity at the start of the trial and annually thereafter.
The results became obvious by end of the first year. The onset of sexual activity was 38 percent later for girls in the treatment group than for girls in the control group. The increase in number of lifetime sexual partners was 25 percent less for treatment group girls than control group girls. The probability of becoming pregnant reduced by 40 percent for schoolgirls who had been dropouts before the study (compared to their counterparts in the control group). A World Bank review of the study concluded that the cash led to declines in the onset of the girls’ sexual activity and declines in risky behavior among those girls who were already sexually active.
Mississippi is better off than Malawi. It has higher incomes, less disease, better schools. But where it does resemble Malawi is in its high rate of teenage sex and pregnancy. According to the Center for Disease Control’s High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data, in 2012, 58 percent of high school students in Mississippi were sexually active and 35 percent did not use condoms. We can partly attribute this to the fact that sex education in Mississippi is oriented around abstinence, with half of its 82 school districts adopting an abstinence-only health education program. But it is also partly due to the state’s high poverty rate. Children in Mississippi are poorer than children anywhere else in the U.S. As in Malawi, poverty and poor sex education combine to lead to risky sexual behavior among Mississippi teenagers. So, can we pay Mississippi teenagers to have less sex?