Despite the value of human capital, the investments on human capital in low- and middle-income countries are limited. This dissertation contains three essays which explore how reduced poverty -- proxied by higher level and lower variability of income -- may increase the quantity of schooling (and decrease children's work), and how individual incentives for students may improve learning outcomes. The first chapter provides motivation to investigate the issue of children's schooling and work in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. The second chapter examines how an increase in household income through expanded adult employment opportunities would affect children's participation in work and schooling using expansion in natural resource extraction industries in Mali. I find that while it does not increase school enrollment, it decreases children's working hours for household tasks. The third chapter studies whether a decreased variability of income through formal insurance products help households to increase human capital investments in children using Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) launched in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Instrumenting cumulative insurance uptake with randomized cumulative discount rates on insurance premium, I find that the insurance shifts children's activities from schooling and work to full-time schooling. The final chapter, coauthored with Hyuncheol Bryant Kim and Jim Berry, investigates the role of student incentive schemes on learning outcomes through a field experiment where we provided scholarship to randomly assigned group of students in Malawi. We find that the Standard merit-based scholarship decreased average test scores of students, especially the ones with lower initial test scores. We show that it is due to demotivation of those students whose chance of winning the scholarship is very low. Collectively, the three essays in the dissertation demonstrate that poverty reduction policies, whether it focuses on the level or the variability of income, contributes in decreasing children's participation in work while not so much in increasing school enrollment. Moreover, it also shows that interventions to incentivize students may not work as intended, thus needs cautious approach in implementing such policies.