Despite advances in primary school enrollment and completion in recent years, school completion in rural areas of Guatemala is low. The problem is especially severe among indigenous female students, where only about one in eight completes primary school. In 1997, the Guatemalan government launched an ambitious program designed to assist poor indigenous girls to remain in primary school (grades 1-4). In partnership with several nongovernmental organizations, a scholarship delivery system was created that was to reach 36,000 female students over 5 years. This paper examines the partnership arrangement, the relative costs of the program, and its success in increasing girls' school persistence. Promotion rates among children who began school in 1997 in the eight departments targeted by the scholarship program showed that the program had little effect on first-year wastage, an extremely serious problem in rural Guatemala. Over 40 percent of rural first-graders were not promoted, regardless of whether or not their schools were scholarship recipients. Schools with scholarship recipients had higher rates of promotion into fourth and fifth grades than did nonrecipient schools. In recipient schools, 17 percent of students received scholarships, but there was only a 2 percent difference in fourth-grade completion between schools with scholarship holders and those without. The difference in cost per fourth-grade graduate between recipient and nonrecipient schools was about twice the individual scholarship amount for 4 years. (Author/SV)