For billions of people across the globe, mobile phones enable relatively cheap and effective communication, as well as access to information and vital services on health, education, society, and the economy. Drawing on context-specific evidence on the effects of the digital revolution, this study provides empirical support for the idea that mobile phones are a vehicle for sustainable development at the global scale. It does so by assembling a wealth of publicly available macro- and individual-level data, exploring a wide range of demographic and social development outcomes, and leveraging a combination of methodological approaches. Macro-level analyses covering 200+ countries reveal that mobile-phone access is associated with lower gender inequality, higher contraceptive uptake, and lower maternal and child mortality. Individual-level analyses of survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, linked with detailed geospatial information, further show that women who own a mobile phone are better informed about sexual and reproductive health services and empowered to make independent decisions. Payoffs are larger among the least-developed countries and among the most disadvantaged micro-level clusters. Overall, our findings suggest that boosting mobile-phone access and coverage and closing digital divides, particularly among women, can be powerful tools to attain empowerment-related sustainable development goals, in an ultimate effort to enhance population health and well-being and reduce poverty.

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This study adopts a cohort perspective to explore trends in child marriage – defined as the proportion of girls who entered first union before the age of 18 – and the effectiveness of policy changes aimed at curbing child marriage by increasing the minimum legal age of marriage. We adopt a cross-national perspective comparing six low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that introduced changes in the minimum age at marriage over the past two decades. These countries belong to three broad regions: Sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Mauritania), Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan), and South Asia (Nepal, Bhutan). We combine individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys with longitudinal information on policy changes from the PROSPERED (Policy-Relevant Observational Studies for Population Health Equity and Responsible Development) project. We adopt data visualization techniques and a regression discontinuity design to obtain estimates of the effect of changes in age-at-marriage laws on early marriage. Our results suggest that changes in minimum-age-at-marriage laws were not effective in curbing early marriage in Benin, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and Bhutan, where child marriage showed little evidence of decline across cohorts. Significant reductions in early marriage following law implementations were observed in Tajikistan and Nepal, yet their effectiveness depended on the model specification and window adopted, thus making them hardly effective as policies to shape girls' later life trajectories. Our findings align with existing evidence from other countries suggesting that changes in age-at-marriage laws rarely achieve the desired outcome. In order for changes in laws to be effective, better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls. Alternative policies need to be devised to ensure that girls’ later-life outcomes, including their participation in higher education and society, are ensured, encouraged, and protected.

Low-cost private schools are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa and are often perceived by parents to be of better quality than public schools. This article assesses the interplay between kindergarten (or preschool) choice, household resources, and children's school readiness in Ghana. We examine how child, household, and school characteristics predict private versus public kindergarten attendance and whether household characteristics are associated with school readiness beyond preschool selection. Using a geospatial-identification strategy to account for observed and unobserved determinants of preschool choice, we find that parental investments-including number of books at home and caregiver help with homework-predict both private-preschool selection and start-of-year child outcomes beyond their influence on preschool choice. We take this evidence as suggesting that investments in children support learning beyond simply selecting the presumed best preschool type. We also find independent associations between attending private preschool and oneyear changes in early literacy scores. The findings contribute knowledge to the literature on the recent expansion of preschool education in sub-Saharan Africa and globally and shed new light on the role of private-preschool attendance in early academic skill development.Pesando acknowledges financial support from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and from the Fulbright Commission. We thank the UBS Optimus Foundation and the World Bank Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) for direct support for the project for which these data were collected. We also thank the Global TIES for Children Center and NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute for providing intramural support to Wolf during the development of this study. Finally, we wish to thank J. Lawrence Aber for providing feedback on a previous version of this essay.

This study investigates whether young people in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) have experienced processes of destandardization of the life course similar to those observed in high‐income societies. We provide two contributions to the relevant literature. First, we use data from 263 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 69 LMICs, offering the richest comparative account to date of women's transition to adulthood (TTA) patterns in the developing world. In so doing, we adopt sequence analysis and shift the focus from individual life‐course events—namely first sexual intercourse, first union, and first birth—to a visually appealing approach that allows us to describe interrelations among events. By focusing on the analysis of trajectories rather than the occurrence of single events, the study provides an in‐depth focus on the timing of events, time intervals between events, and how experiencing (or not) one event might have consequences for subsequent markers in the TTA in cross‐national comparative perspective. Second, we identify clusters of TTA and explore their changes across cohorts by region and household location of residence (rural vs. urban). We document significant differences by macro‐regions, yet relative stability across cohorts. We interpret the latter as suggestive of cultural specificities that make the TTA resistant to change and slow to converge across regions, if converging at all. Also, we find that much of the difference across cluster typologies ensues from variation related to when the transition begins (early vs. late), rather than from the duration between events, which tends to be uniformly quick across three out of four clusters.