Economics of Education Review 19 2000 63–87 www.elsevier.comlocateeconedurev
Schooling of girls and boys in a West African country: the effects of parental education, income, and household
structure
Peter Glick , David E. Sahn
Cornell University, 3M28 Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Received 4 June 1997; accepted 15 October 1998
Abstract
In this paper we investigate gender differences in the determinants of several schooling indicators—grade attainment, current enrollment, and withdrawal from school—in a poor urban environment in West Africa, using ordered and binary
probit models incorporating household-level random effects. Increases in household income lead to greater investments in girls’ schooling but have no significant impact on schooling of boys. Improvements in father’s education raises the
schooling of both sons and daughters favoring the latter but mother’s education has significant impact only on daught- ers’ schooling; these estimates are suggestive of differences in maternal and paternal preferences for schooling daughters
relative to sons. Domestic responsibilities, represented for example by the number of very young siblings, impinge strongly on girls’ education but not on boys’. Policies such as subsidized childcare that reduce the opportunity cost of
girls’ time in the home may therefore increase their ability to get an education. JEL 015, I21
1999 Elsevier Science
Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Economic development; Human capital
1. Introduction
Low levels of human capital are widely considered to be a major impediment to economic growth and the
elimination of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent studies of several African countries document the exist-
ence of returns in the labor market to investments in edu- cation for both men and women.
1
Researchers and pol-
Corresponding author. Fax: 1 1-607-255-0178; e-mail: pjg4cornell.edu
1
Studies estimating earnings functions disaggregated by gen- der and including appropriate controls for selection into the
labor force or into particular sectors include those by Vijverberg 1993; Glick and Sahn 1997; and Appleton, Hoddinott,
Krishnan and Max 1995. These studies generally find signifi- cant schooling impacts on both male and female earnings. It
has been argued, however, that private returns to primary edu- cation in Africa have fallen in recent years see Appleton et al.,
1995; Knight, Sabot Hovey, 1992.
0272-775799 - see front matter
1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 7 2 - 7 7 5 7 9 9 0 0 0 2 9 - 1
icy-makers have increasingly recognized the benefits in particular to expanding girls’ access to schooling.
Improvements in women’s education will help to elimin- ate gender inequalities in employment opportunities and
earnings and will also have important non-market bene- fits such as better child nutrition and lower fertility
Strauss Thomas, 1995. However, despite dramatic increases in both male and female enrollments in the first
few decades after independence, girls’ schooling in African countries still lags behind that of boys at all lev-
els and particularly at post-primary levels World Bank, 1988.
In Guinea, one of the poorest nations in Africa, pre- vious work has shown that the earnings of women and
men increase with schooling in both self-employment and wage employment Glick Sahn, 1997. An
ambitious education policy has been successful in raising primary enrollments over the last few years, reversing
declines that occurred during the 1980s. Primary
64 P. Glick, D.E. Sahn Economics of Education Review 19 2000 63–87
enrollment rates remain below 40, however—among the lowest in the world World Bank, 1995. In addition,
in spite of a commitment to improving girls’ access to schooling, the ratio of female to male primary students in
1993 was only 44. This gender disparity in enrollments increases sharply with education level: girls represent
only 25 of lower secondary students, 20 of upper secondary students, and just 6 of university students.
Thus gender in Guinea is an important determinant both of attending school at all and of the level of schooling
achieved.
In light of the benefits to investments in education, it is important to identify the factors underlying household
decisions regarding the education of children, and especially decisions about girls’ schooling. The edu-
cation of parents has been found in many studies to be one of the most important determinants of child school-
ing. Of particular interest in the West African context, where incomplete pooling of household resources
appears to be the norm and preferences of husbands and wives may diverge sharply,
2
is whether maternal and paternal schooling have equivalent effects on the edu-
cation of boys and girls. It might be expected that edu- cated women have both strong preferences for schooling
their daughters preferences which may not be shared by their spouses and the ability to ensure that household
resources are allocated for this purpose. If as a conse- quence of these factors a mother’s education has a
greater impact on girls’ schooling than on boys’, there would be a further rationale for public investments in
female schooling: the intergenerational effects of such investments will lead in the future to even greater
reductions in the gender gap in schooling and ultimately, in earnings.
Boys and girls may also differ with respect to the ways in which household structure, in particular the presence
of young children, impinges upon their ability to acquire an education by affecting the burden of household
responsibilities. These responsibilities are likely to be imposed on girls more than boys. If this is the case, then
policies for example, subsidized childcare that reduce the dependence of households on the domestic labor of
girls may increase girls’ enrollments, thus also helping to close the gender gap in schooling.
Research on the household determinants of schooling is quite sparse for sub-Saharan Africa, owing in part to
2
There is a sizable anthropological literature for Africa, and West Africa specifically, indicating that men and women within
households do not pool income or make expenditure decisions jointly. See, for example, Fapohunda 1988, Munachonga
1988, and Guyer and Peters 1987 and references therein. Complementing these studies is the econometric analysis of
household expenditures in Coˆte d’Ivoire by Hoddinott and Had- dad 1995, who find that expenditure patterns differ depending
on the share of total family income earned by women.
the shortage until recently of comprehensive household level data sets from the region.
3
This study examines schooling choices using household survey data from
Conakry, the capital and largest urban area of Guinea. We focus on the impact of parental education, household
structure, and income on the schooling of boys and girls. Several schooling outcomes are examined in the empiri-
cal work in this paper: years of schooling or grade attain- ment; current enrollment status; and leaving school. We
focus on multiple schooling indicators instead of a single one, such as current enrollment, for two reasons. First,
each of the three illuminates a different aspect of school- ing choice and thus is of interest in its own right. Second,
as described in detail below, each has both advantages and disadvantages, the latter largely reflecting limits in
the available data. Since each approach is imperfect, checking for consistency of results with regard to key
variables provides a useful informal test of the robust- ness of the findings.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the conceptual framework underlying
the empirical work and Section 3 discusses the econo- metric methodology. The dataset is described and some
descriptive results are discussed in Section 4. The econo- metric results are presented in Section 5. The paper con-
cludes in Section 6 with a discussion of policy impli- cations of the results.
2. Conceptual framework
