IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v21y2012i5p-722.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Free Primary Education Narrow Gender Differences in Schooling? Evidence from Kenya -super-†

Author

Listed:
  • Adrienne M. Lucas
  • Isaac M. Mbiti

Abstract

We identify the impact of the 2003 Kenyan Free Primary Education (FPE) programme on gender imbalances in the number of students graduating from primary school and achievement on the primary school exit examination. Our identification strategy exploits temporal and spatial variations in the pre-programme dropout rates between districts in a difference-in-differences strategy. We find that the programme boosted primary school completion rates of both boys and girls, but had a larger effect for boys, thereby increasing the gender gap in graduation. Additionally, the programme led to a widening of the achievement gap in government schools. Overall, FPE increased educational access, but did not close gender gaps, suggesting that complementary programmes that specifically target girls may be necessary to reduce these gaps. Copyright 2012 , Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Adrienne M. Lucas & Isaac M. Mbiti, 2012. "Does Free Primary Education Narrow Gender Differences in Schooling? Evidence from Kenya -super-†," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 21(5), pages -722, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:21:y:2012:i:5:p:-722
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejs021
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:21:y:2012:i:5:p:-722. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.