Demand for schooling in rural Senegal

This thesis aims to understand the determinants of household demand for schooling in rural Senegal. Using an original dataset including 504 households living in the North of Senegal and based on the results of a literature review on the determinants of schooling, it analyses in three empirical chapters what explains household behaviour when it comes to investing in education. The first empirical chapter explores determinants of schooling by fitting a logit model to estimate the likelihood of children being enrolled at school conditional on child, parent, household, school and community characteristics. It shows that the determinants of schooling for girls and boys must be analysed separately as the estimated coefficients are significantly different for the boy and girl subsamples. Girls’ education depends on family structure, notably the number of young children in the household, and the household’s income, whereas boys’ education depends on their mother’s education. This suggests that the opportunity cost of time may be a barrier for girls as they are usually required to help to take care of young children. However, the fact that the size of the area cultivated by the household is not statistically significant suggests that the need for child labour for agricultural work is not a barrier to schooling. Both girls and boys are affected by the availability of schools and the community social norms proxied by the share of children attending a Koranic school. Interestingly, girls and boys seem to benefit from living in a household with access to electricity and a robustness check using an instrumental variable approach shows that this result is not due to the endogeneity of the household’s access to electricity. Further robustness checks include different ways of measuring household income and parental education and alternative estimation methods. They confirm the conclusions of the main model. The second empirical chapter deals with the intergenerational transmission of schooling and, more specifically, the relative effects of mother’s and father’s education on the level of schooling attained by a child. The chapter starts with a review of different published studies from Sub-Saharan African countries where the effects of mother’s and father’s education were simultaneously estimated. The review finds that, on average, mother’s education is more important than father’s education in explaining the educational achievement of young children, whereas the opposite is true for older children. Using my dataset, I then replicate a study on the effects of parental education on a child’s level of schooling attained in Senegal that found a larger effect of father’s education than mother’s education, after controlling for the endogeneity of education. Using a similar method, I also show that father’s education is more important than mother’s education in my sample but my results are sensitive to the estimation method used and age range of children included in the sample. Taking into consideration that the number of years of schooling are censored, that is children still enrolled at school have not achieved their final level of schooling, increases the importance of mother’s education relative to father’s education. Also, in line with my literature review and another published review, my results show that mother’s education is more important for younger children, whereas father’s education is more important for older children. The third empirical chapter attempts to shed light on the decision process of polygynous households regarding children’s education. It contributes to the limited literature on the intra-household allocation of resources of polygynous households. First, it shows that despite the higher social status of their mother, children of senior co-wives do not enjoy more schooling. Secondly, the positive effect of other co-wives’ education on a child’s level of education suggests cooperation between co-wives in raising children. Finally, I test if, when it comes to decisions regarding schooling, polygynous households act as a single entity (unitary model) or as separate entities (collective model). I overcome the fact that I cannot account for unobserved heterogeneity of mother’s characteristics, which could explain differences in schooling achievement of siblings from different co-wives, by using an original method taking advantage of heterogeneous effects of additional brothers and sisters on a child’s education. My results show that, at least for girls, decisions regarding children’s education are made separately between co-wives. I argue that this finding suggests that husbands tend to equalise the number of educated children per co-wife. This is an important result for policies seeking to target children living in polygynous households. Moreover, this behaviour may have a detrimental effect on a child’s achievement as resources for education are less efficiently allocated than in monogamous households