Primary Schooling in the Household Context

Primary schooling in the household context

Iris ChristianeGoensch

Center for international development and environmental research, University of Giessen

Senckenbergstr. 3,

D-35390 Giessen

Germany

The purpose of this paper is to explain the low level of school participation in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal and to shed light on differences both between and within these countries. In-depth descriptive analysis based on DHS data is followed by logistic regression analyses. Two different measures of schooling are used. Interaction terms allow assessing if the household structure or the place of residence have a different impact on girls' schooling than on boys' schooling. Results confirm late enrollment and rural residence as main issues hampering complete enrollment and the completion of four years of schooling. Except for Senegal, boys are significantly more likely to be enrolled in school than girls. The negative impact of being female is statistically significant and of bigger magnitude for the estimation of four years of schooling.

Keywords: school enrollment; West Africa; education; development; Millennium Development Goals.

Acknowledgements: Funding from the Thyssen Foundation in support of the project “Determinants of educational decisions" is gratefully acknowledged. Daniela Kautz and Steffen Graef provided excellent research assistance.

1Introduction

According to the UNDP Human Development Index, most West African countriesregularly rank among the last countries of the world. While their performancein all dimensions of the index is rather poor and the countries are characterizedas having low human development, the educational dimension still is aspecific weakness. Nevertheless, today most young people have better access toeducation and receive longer schooling than their parents and grandparents havehad. As a result, school enrollment rates have risen especially at primary schoollevel during the last decades. This is also true for Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali,Niger and Senegal, five francophone West African countries that are studied inthis paper. Mean primary school net enrollment ratios for 2001-2009 officiallyranged from 54 percent (Niger) to 72.9 percent (Senegal) with Benin being apositive outlier with an enrollment ratio of 92.8 percent (UNDP, 2010). Macrodata thus points to a clear improvement of educational participation. On theother hand, these aggregated figures do not provide any insights into the accessthat specific groups have to educational facilities.

In this paper, I use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)for Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal to study the determinantsof primary school participation, which is captured by two different outcomemeasures: Current school enrollment of children of primary school age and thecompletion of four or more years of schooling of young people aged 15 to 19.

Descriptive analysis reveals that enrollment is considerably higher in urban thanin rural areas for all five countries. Furthermore, there is a huge gap betweenmale and female enrollment: The share of boys enrolled is markedly higherfor Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. As a first step in the regressionanalysis, I study the reasons for the differences in enrollment and the generallylow level using a logit approach. This allows assessing the importance of childand family characteristics for explaining school enrollment. Interaction termsgive additional information on gender differences and allow to investigate iffamily wealth, the household structure and urban or rural residence affect girlsdifferently than boys. The analysis of completion of four years of schooling isperformed in a similar way.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly givessome general information on West Africa and describes the state of schooling inBenin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal. The data sets and variables usedare introduced in Section 3 which also includes the descriptive and regressionanalysis on the individual level. Section 4 concludes.

2Analysis of schooling in West Africa

Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal belong to sub-Saharan Africaand are former French colonies that gained independence in 1960. Table 1 givessome general information on

Table 1.Country characteristics.

Note: * is taken from Human Development Report 2010, all other figures are from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Poverty rates are from 2003 for Benin and Burkina Faso, from 2006 for Mali,from 2007 for Niger and from 2005 for Senegal. If not otherwise indicated, allremaining data are from 2009.

the countries. A remnant common to these fivecountries, besides of French being the official language, is a schooling system thatis structured as the traditional French system: Six years of primary schoolingare followed by two cycles of secondary schooling: The first cycle lasts fouryears, the second cycle, the lycée lasts three years. The transition from each stage of schooling to the next one is limited by standardized exams. Only thosestudents that pass the exams are allowed to proceed with the first or secondcycle of secondary school, respectively. The baccalauréat exams at the end ofthe second cycle of secondary school entitle students to enter higher education.

2.1Progress in schooling

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted at the UN MillenniumSummit in 2000 were set to be achieved by 2015. They cover a wide rangeof issues - poverty, hunger, health issues, environmental sustainability,and genderequality - and also include universal primary education. More precisely, thetarget is to “ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike,will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling".[1] Three indicatorshave been adopted for monitoring progress toward this goal: The net enrollmentratio in primary education, the survival rate at the last grade of primary schooland the literacy rate of 15 to 24 year-olds.

The development of enrollment rates in most regions of the world is promising,but Africa is lacking behind.

Table 2.Education information.

Note: * Taken from UNDP (2010). All remaining figures are taken from UISUNESCO Institute for Statistics (2010).

The educational expansion that took place inthe middle of the last century was followed by a long period of stagnation andeven decline in some countries. In the course of the Education for All (EFA) initiative, first launched in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, basic education has moreand more become the focus of attention. Policies like school fee abolishment and an expansion of the education sector have raised enrollment rates.

Table 2 includes the mean years of schooling of adults, which is very low especiallyfor Burkina Faso (at 1.3), Mali and Niger (at 1.4). Today's primaryschool enrollment rates point to an improvement of these figures. It is, however,questionable, if the pace of the improvement suffices to reach the millenniumdevelopment goals. Lewin (2008) explores the current status of education inrelation to the Millennium Development Goals and the Education for All goals.

He stresses that high drop-out rates are a major threat to achieving the goalsin sub-Saharan Africa.

Similarly, Lloyd and Hewett (2003) investigate impediments to universalschooling in sub-Saharan Africa. Their analysis based on DHS data showsthat the gap between primary enrollment rates of girls and boys is narrowing,which is partly due to a stagnation in boys' attainment since the early 1980s.Specifically for francophone West Africa, the gap has narrowed, but remainsbigger than in other parts of the continent. In contrast to the gender gap, thegap between the richest and the poorest households is still huge. The verylow school participation of the two poorest quintiles is a major impediment,according to the authors.

Bennell (2002) focuses on the target of doubling primary school enrollmentsin sub-Saharan Africa by 2015 and points out that it will be difficult to provideenough facilities to increase the capacities of primary schooling. The rapidexpansion of the sector has already led to quality problems that are reflected byhigh repetition rates. In most sub-Saharan African countries, completion ratesremained unchanged or even declined during the second part of the 1990s. Thesequality problems and low chances of school completion lower (perceived) rates ofreturns to education. While for the last generation already completed primaryeducation had significantly improved job opportunities, educational expansionhas led to higher requirements. The fact that the availability of secondaryschools is still limited in many (rural) areas contributes to the issue of decliningperceived returns to education and diminishes demand for primary schooling.

These consequences have for example been encountered in Malawi, where thegovernment has started its policy of free primary education in 1994. While thisprogram could theoretically have lead to the attainment of the MDGs, Kadzamiraand Rose (2003) find that the affect of the policy is ambiguous and notpro-poor. Even though school fees and uniforms have been abolished, costs forfamilies with many children remain high: Direct costs include school materialsand indirect costs are foregone income and time to care for family members,especially younger siblings or AIDS patients. High repetition rates lead to along time of primary schooling which increases these costs. The increase of enrollmentprovoked by the abolition of fees made the employment of additionalteachers necessary so the share of qualified teachers dropped. Since programsfor the education of adults are insufficient, the age range at primary schoolsis very wide (four to 18 years) which complicates teaching. The channelingof resources to primary schooling also means that investments into secondaryschooling were reduced so hat problems at the transition to secondary schoolingaggravated. School curricula, however, are oriented on those students who attendsecondary school, so that the relevance of schooling might be not so clearfor children that will only attend for a few years. According to Kadzamira andRose (2003), the quality problems disproportionably affect the rural poor whoare confronted with bigger class sizes and less qualified teachers.

2.2Parental income and other influence factors

Glick and Sahn (1999) analyze determinants of several schooling indicators inConakry, the capital and main urban center of Guinea, and gender differencestherein. They find that siblings under five living in the household have a negativeimpact on the enrollment of girls and that increases in household incomeimprove girls' schooling but have no significant impact on the schooling indicatorsfor boys. Furthermore, mothers' education is found to be positively andsignificantly related to girls' schooling only.

Lewin and Sabates (2011) find that primary school participation is still verymuch determined by household wealth in spite of Education for All and commitmentsto pro-poor policies. Their analysis based on data from two DHS wavesalso shows that girls and children living in rural areas are more likely to beout of school than boys and urban residents in most of the seven francophonesub-Saharan African countries considered. Overall, they find lower levels ofschooling in the francophone countries and less progress between the two surveywaves than in the anglophone countries. The share of pupils that are two ormore years older than the age officially corresponding to the grade, however, isclearly higher in anglophone countries.

Grimm (2011) uses a natural experiment in Burkina Faso to explore the effectof household income on the investments in children's education. Results indicatea high income elasticity of school enrollment. The decrease in enrollment asa consequence of lower income is bigger for girls than for boys. In settingswhere the (rural) population relies on few income sources that heavily dependon favorable external conditions such as weather and world markets, incomeshocks and reduced purchasing power are hard to cushion.

Montgomery and Hewett (2005) use data from the Senegal Multiple IndicatorCluster Survey 2000 to analyze schooling in urban and rural Senegal. Theycalculate a measure of relative standard of living for each household and finda high impact of living standards on three measures of schooling especiallyin urban areas. In addition to current enrollment, Montgomery and Hewettconsider whether a young person has ever attended school and whether she or hehas completed four or more grades of primary school. For all of these measures,they find lower school participation of rural residents and of girls, but the gendergap is smaller for enrollment and almost negligible for the enrollment of girlsfrom specific age groups.

2.3The importance of the demand side

Most household surveys do not provide information on the availability and accessibilityof facilities such as (primary) schools. A common criticism to studiesthat analyze schooling with these data is that the most important determinantof enrollment is school availability which is not captured in these studies. Filmer(2007) combines household data with official data on school availability to assessthe impact of building new schools, i.e. reducing the distance to the nearestschool, on enrollment. For his sample of rural areas in 21 low-income countries,he finds that distance to school and enrollment are negatively associated, butthat the magnitude of the effect is small. As consequence, the study suggeststhat building schools might not be the best way to increase enrollment and thatthe demand side plays an important role.

Similarly, Handa (2002) finds that school availability has a positive andsignificant impact on enrollment in rural Mozambique. Regarding the demandside, literacy programs for household heads also seem to sharply increasethe demand for primary schooling for children while the effect of increasingincome levels is modest. Considering cost-effectiveness of interventions, theauthor identifies increasing adult literacy as a measure that is at least as efficientas increasing school coverage.

3Empirical analysis of schooling in the household context

3.1Data and descriptive statistics

Household data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are availablefor the five countries for adjacent years. The surveys in Benin, Mali, Nigerand Senegal were all conducted in 2005 or 2006, only the survey in BurkinaFaso took place earlier, in 2003. DHS belong to the most widespread multipurpose-surveys carried out in developing countries and are representative onthe national as well as regional level. The datasets provide information regardingthe composition of households, socio-economic data for all household members,information on housing, agricultural activities, assets and much more. Whilethe questionnaires are standardized, not all questions are always asked in allcountries.[2]

I use two different measures of schooling that are related to the millenniumdevelopment goal of universal primary education. The United Nations haveestablished three indicators to monitor progress towards this goal: Firstly, thenet enrolment ratio in primary education, secondly, the proportion of pupilsstarting grade one who reach the last grade of primary school and thirdly, theliteracy rate of 15- to 24-year-olds.[3] These indicators take into account thatprimary schooling has a different duration in different countries. If the first twoof them reach levels of 99 percent, universal primary schooling is tangible. Ifthis was the case, complete literacy of young adults would be achieved. Allthese indicators show if the goal is reached for several cohorts of pupils.

While the information on literacy in the DHS data is not sufficient, thefirst two indicators are reflected in the data and used in this paper. Currentenrollment is analyzed for children that were of official primary school age atthe time of the survey, that is children aged six to eleven for Benin and BurkinaFaso and children aged seven to twelve for Mali, Niger and Senegal. Whether ayoung person has completed four or more years of schooling is the second binaryoutcome variable.[4] People that have attended school for four or more years arevery likely to have acquired basic literacy and numeracy that they will notquickly forget. Children who enter primary school at the age of six or sevencan complete four years of schooling at the age of ten or eleven. Because ofwidespread late enrollment, I will consider youths aged 15 to 19 for the analysisof completion of four years of schooling.

Table 3 shows the enrollment rates and the means of all explanatory variablescalculated from DHS data for children of official primary school age. Enrollmentin Benin (61.7 %) is slightly higher than in Senegal (58.2 %) and substantiallyhigher than in the other countries. The lowest enrollment rate is found forBurkina Faso where only 27.7 % of primary school aged children are enrolled.

For all countries, the calculated enrollment rates are lower than the official onesshown by Table2, basically for the following reasons: Official data is oftenbased on supply-side data, i.e. the number of pupils that schools report tothe authorities; and schools often have incentives to report high numbers. Evenif children drop out of school early during the school year or never turn up, they are still officially considered to be enrolled once they were registered in thebeginning of the year. In contrast, during the Demographic and Health Surveys,the respondent is asked, if a child is currently frequenting school. Moreover, netenrollment is defined as the number of official primary school age children whoare enrolled in primary education as a percentage of the total children of thesame age group. The official enrollment numbers are thus divided by estimatesof the population of the age group. These estimations, however, are not always accurate and are subject to changes in underlying management informationsystems.[5] On top of this, Table 2 shows figures for 2008, while the DHS dataused in this paper, were collected between 2003 and 2006.

Figure 1.Enrollment by age.