Poster #93 - School Duration and Educational Progression: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Cameroon

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

School-duration reforms are common in low- and middle-income countries, yet there is limited causal evidence on how changing the length of primary schooling affects subsequent educational trajectories. This paper studies Cameroon’s 2006/2007 reform, which shortened the Anglophone primary cycle from seven to six years while leaving the Francophone subsystem unchanged. The reform was introduced primarily for harmonization and administrative reasons rather than as an explicit pedagogical intervention, making it a useful case for understanding how structural reforms can shape educational outcomes. The paper asks two questions: Did the reform increase transition from primary to secondary school, and did it affect whether students remained on track in their educational progression?I use quantitative data from the 2011 Cameroon Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), drawing on nationally representative household-level information on schooling outcomes and demographic characteristics. The analysis focuses on cohorts expected to complete primary school just before and just after the reform. Exposure to the reform is identified using subsystem affiliation, proxied by survey language, together with cohort timing.The empirical strategy is a difference-in-differences design comparing changes across Anglophone and Francophone cohorts before and after the reform. The identifying assumption is that, absent the policy, outcomes would have evolved similarly across the two subsystems. I assess this assumption using balance evidence, comparisons of pre-reform schooling distributions, event-study plots, and formal pre-trend tests. I also conduct robustness checks using wider cohort windows, placebo comparisons, alternative outcome definitions, a non-linear specification, and a narrower Francophone comparison group.The results show that the reform increased the probability of secondary-school enrollment by 9.4 percentage points, a gain of about 13 percent relative to the pre-policy Francophone mean. By contrast, I find no average effect on timely educational progression, measured by whether students had reached the grade level expected for their cohort. Formal heterogeneity tests provide little evidence that the enrollment gains differed systematically by gender, poverty status, or residence, although rural respondents experienced more favorable progression effects than urban respondents.These findings suggest that shortening the primary cycle relaxed an important structural barrier to entry into secondary school without producing a corresponding average change in students’ subsequent pace of progression. The paper contributes to policy debates on school-duration reform by showing that structural changes can affect educational attainment even when they are not designed as learning interventions. More broadly, it highlights the importance of household time and resource constraints in shaping educational transitions in low-income settings.

Author

• Lontum E Nchadze, Oregon State University
  Presenting Author