Yes, I can. Let me take you to India, since you mentioned India and South Asia in your introductory comments. Haryana state, which is just north of Delhi, has one of the most strikingly disproportionate sex ratios in terms of missing girls. It also had an unusual government in power from 1994 to 1998 that recognized that if they wanted to change downstream the value and experience of young girls, especially among the extreme poor, they would need to introduce some kind of social policy that would increase the value down the road of those girls. They put together the Apni Beti Apna Dhan social policy. Families earning under $15 a month at the time of the birth of their daughters had the option to enrol their daughters in this program, with the promise that if the girl remained unmarried at 18 years, she would receive a bond payment in her name totalling probably the equivalent today of $100 or $120, which is a lot of money for a family in those economic conditions.
Now, the reason I cite this as a case is that this was a natural experiment. You had families who opted in and families who did not, all coming from that same socio-economic class. These girls, of course, began turning 18 as of two years ago. We have been working with the Haryana state government to understand what has been the pathway and success of this social policy. The final data analysis is undergoing.
We have found that girls in the experimental group, those whose families signed them up for the bond, in fact stayed in school longer, and 11% of them have delayed their age at marriage, now that they're 18 or 19 years old. In the control group, made up of girls not enrolled in the program, the girls ended school much earlier and have had slightly more propensity to marry at an early age.
It's important to see the importance of social policy and conditional cash transfers in creating social change at an accelerated pace within a community. What's interesting about this particular strategy is that it was very delayed, very deferred, gratification. They had to wait 18 years for the results to kick in, if you will. There are now new programs across India that have intermediate payments or support to the girls and their families to help them along that pathway.
Looking at that kind of evidence, perhaps Canada could begin to integrate some of these findings or recommendations into their development policy about where they would like to invest in this particular issue in terms of solutions. To be able to replicate and scale these kinds of solutions I think makes very good sense. It's good investment sense.