Adrienne Lucas’ international research into the effects of HIV/AIDS treatment on education could help reframe the way people think about both educational reform and the cost-benefit analysis of social programs.

Lucas is an associate professor of economics in the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, as well as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

“Being at Lerner has allowed me to work on many interesting projects in Africa, and most recently South Asia, all of which have the goal of increasing student achievement and years of completed schooling worldwide,” Lucas said.

“And then I get to share my research and experiences with the engaged, motivated students of UD,” she added. “I might have the best job ever.”

Lucas’ current research focuses on the intergenerational effects of adult HIV/AIDS treatment in Zambia, where 13 percent of prime-age adults are HIV positive and 20 percent of children live in a household with an HIV positive adult.

In the video above, Lucas was interviewed last month about her paper, “The Impact of Adult Health on Children’s Schooling: Evidence on the Intergenerational Effects of HIV/AIDS Treatment,” in Helsinki, Finland at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) Conference on Human Capital and Growth.

While at the conference, Lucas presented the paper and chaired a session.

“The interplay between adult health and children’s schooling has implications well beyond just the HIV/AIDS pandemic, because there are so many ways in which adults can be ill that can affect their children’s schooling,” Lucas said in the video.

“HIV infects one generation and affects the next,” she added.

In the video, Lucas explains that her team examined the impact of Zambia’s nationwide program, started in 2004, that was designed to make antiretroviral therapy (ART) available to all adults with HIV/ADIS.

Studying the period between 2004 and 2007, Lucas’ team found a large effect on children being “age for grade” – not held back or repeating grades.

The data also showed that over this period, students became significantly more likely to start primary school at the official school entry age of 7 years old.

“We want to know why this is happening,” Lucas said. “We hypothesize that children are more likely to go to school because they’re not ill themselves or not caring for someone else who’s ill in the household.”

But the effect sizes are so large, she said, that her research suggests there are even more factors at play.

These could include many variables, like:

• Improved mental health or mental outlook in the household.
• More mental capacity to focus on schoolwork because of less worrying about what’s happening at home.
• Increased income in the household.

As Lucas explained, the complexity of these positive outcomes could have big implications for the way people think about health care and educational programs.

“When we think about the cost of a program and the cost effectiveness of a program… we often focus on who is directly treated,” Lucas said.

In the case of Zambia’s HIV/AIDS treatment program, she continued, adults are directly treated, but their children also see tremendous benefits.

“So when we think about the cost-benefit of a program… we need to consider what’s happening to other people in the household, other people in the community, and the interaction between human capital of multiple generations.”

Further, Lucas added, “When we think about increasing children’s schooling, we often focus at school. But this shows that there’s a tremendous impact of the home environment of children’s schooling.”

Lucas, a development economist who specializes in the economics of education and disease, is currently conducting a variety of global research projects. She has published research on malaria, free primary education, secondary school choice, the return to school quality and early primary school literacy.

Over the past two years, Lucas and her collaborators have raised over $850,000 in grants to support education research projects in Ghana, Pakistan and Uganda.

In addition to the project discussed in the video, Lucas is currently researching:

• Whether teacher incentives in Uganda can encourage teachers to teach to students of all ability levels.
• The importance of information for secondary school choice decisions in Ghana.
• The role of technology and pedagogy training in increasing student achievement in middle school science and math in Pakistan, with Sabrin Beg of UD’s economics department.
• The role of government-appointed teacher supervisors in encouraging student achievement in Ghana.

In April, Lucas was an invited attendee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Children and Education program meetings in Washington, D.C.