Parental education and high school completion in the urban informal settlements in Kenya

A well-established empirical association exists between family background and children’s educational attainment. Studies have shown the importance of parental education for not just children’s educational outcomes but also other behavioral, and health outcomes. In this paper, data collected by African Population and Health Research Center in 2012 across Nairobi’s slums are fitted to a logistic regression to estimate the likelihood of secondary school completion. Even after controlling for influential covariates such as socioeconomic status; parental survivorship; slum area of residence and duration of stay; marital status; and substance abuse the effect of parental education on secondary school completion persists. Among female adolescents compared to male adolescents, parental presence, drug abuse, and migration into the slum compared to birth in the slum were associated with lower school completion. Overall, the study confirms the importance of parental education for adolescent secondary school completion but extends its effects beyond that reported in the literature on SSA, which is that mother’s and father’s education affect the acquisition of literacy and numeracy, math achievement, age for grade, and cognitive development