Who Pays for Education? How Poor Egyptian Mothers Finance Their Children's Education

• In Event: 384 - Section on Economic Sociology Paper Session. Social Economies of Households

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to bring the household into the study of institutional quality. Households, and particularly poor households, bear the brunt of “weak quality” institutions as their clients. Drawing on qualitative data collected from 2008 to 2013, this paper uses Zelizer’s relational approach to consider the case of informal education fees imposed on parents by teachers in a low-income slum in Cairo. While the teachers are wrongdoers in the parents accounts, these amounts are levied to supplement teachers’ own poverty wages. I argue that this off-the-books cost emerges due to clashing institutional logics on a policy-level in Egypt that results in the dysfunction of public schools as organizations. Moreover, due to feminized poverty burdens within households, I show that women are tasked with the management of this expense which includes negotiations with husbands, children, and teachers as well as the creative and intentional cobbling together of disparate resources.

Author

• Hebatalla Gowayed, Princeton University