IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v24y2015i4p559-592..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

School Fees and Access to Primary Education: Assessing Four Decades of Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Talan B. İşcan
  • Daniel Rosenblum
  • Katie Tinker

Abstract

In this article, we examine the relationship between primary school fees and education quality and access over the past forty years in seven sub-Saharan African countries. School fees were introduced as a means for revenue-constrained governments to fund the improvement and expansion of primary education. Recently there has been a move towards their abolition. We find that the introduction of fees decreased primary school enrolment, without achieving significant quality improvements. We also discuss the impact on quality of the major increases in enrolment following the abolition of school fees and identify the government funding shortfall amplified by this policy change.

Suggested Citation

  • Talan B. İşcan & Daniel Rosenblum & Katie Tinker, 2015. "School Fees and Access to Primary Education: Assessing Four Decades of Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 24(4), pages 559-592.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:24:y:2015:i:4:p:559-592.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejv007
    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.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Smith, William C. & Joshi, Devin K., 2016. "Public vs. private schooling as a route to universal basic education: A comparison of China and India," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 153-165.
    2. Sophia Kan & Stephan Klasen, 2021. "Evaluating universal primary education in Uganda: School fee abolition and educational outcomes," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(1), pages 116-147, February.
    3. Bennell, Paul, 2023. "The attainment of gender education equality: A preliminary assessment of country performance in sub-Saharan Africa," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    4. Langsten, Ray, 2017. "School fee abolition and changes in education indicators," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 163-175.
    5. Maluccio, John A. & Hussein, Mohamed & Abuya, Benta & Muluve, Eva & Muthengi, Eunice & Austrian, Karen, 2018. "Adolescent girls’ primary school mobility and educational outcomes in urban Kenya," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 75-87.
    6. Jingyi Huang & Yumei Guo & Yang Song, 2016. "Intergenerational transmission of education in China: Pattern, mechanism, and policies," Working Papers 415, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

    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:24:y:2015:i:4:p:559-592.. 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.