School and school-related skills

We collected school-related information of each participant. We asked informants about the maximum school grade they had attained. Since, overall, levels of school achievement are low, and as in some of the communities some individuals acquire or improve their school-related skills outside the school (e.g. basic numeracy can be improved when negotiating prices with vendors or traders), we also conducted direct measures on literacy and numeracy. We assessed each informant’s literacy by requesting them to read a simple sentence. We had sentences in native languages and in the national languages and used the one in which the informant performed best to assign a score. We coded answers for literacy tests as 0 = unable, 1 = with difficulty, 2 = well, but because low variation in data, we later grouped people who read (either with difficulty or well) in a single group as opposed to people who could not read at all. To assess numeracy we asked informants to perform four elementary calculations (adding, subtraction, multiplication, and division). We assigned a 1 to each correct answer and stopped the test if the person made an error. Thus, numeracy could range from zero to four. We had three equally difficult versions of the literacy and numeracy tests and chose one at random for each person.