Financing education equity: A study of three countries

• In Event: Education Equity Research Initiative: The Equity Implications of Household Contributions to Education

Proposal

What is the relationship between educational equity and school financing? To what extent do public resources compensate or exacerbate disparities in the quality of schooling? This presentation contributes to the CIES 2017 theme of problematizing inequality in education by examining differences in education resources across subnational groups using three cases from Sub-Saharan Africa: Malawi, Ethiopia, and Uganda. The presentation is based on a background paper produced for the Education Commission (also known as the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity), a new global initiative established to develop a compelling investment case and financing pathway for achieving equal education opportunity, chaired by Gordon Brown.

Across all three countries, primary school fees have long been abolished; however, as education systems face resource constraints, families are routinely asked to contribute towards the schooling of their children. While family participation in school finance is not in itself a negative phenomenon, the implications of the extent of expected financial contribution can be a concern from an equity standpoint – and as such, may require a rethinking and reorientation of policy making and international technical and financial assistance. In the context of resource scarcity, effective use of public finance in the education sector is of paramount importance. Even more crucial is equitable use of public finance, bringing the most disadvantaged groups and individuals closer to the societal average. In this presentation, we unpack the nature of the household spending on education and investigate whether the expected cost of participation substantially deepens the equity gap between the poor and the relatively wealthier households in school enrollment decisions.

Across all three case studies, we pose the following research questions: 1) What are the patterns in public and household spending on education at the subnational level within the case countries? 2) Are education resources available for school-aged children distributed equitably across wealth quintiles and subnational regions? and 3) How does the cost of school participation affect attendance decisions among households?

We address the first two research question through in-depth descriptive analyses of household expenditure data from the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS), combined with district/province level public education spending at the subnational level. In order to answer the third research question, we use LSMS data on grade and level attendance by wealth quintile and build a regression model to determine to what extent costs associated with education are prohibitive to attendance and how this effect differs across households with different levels of wealth.

Our analysis of sub-national government spending on education in these three countries shows great variability in per pupil spending across districts and provinces. Looking at household spending on education, disparities between wealth quintiles, the poorest and the wealthiest in particular, are obvious, with the wealthiest families being able to invest much more in education when government spending is inadequate. The extent of these disparities, however, varies across the three countries.

Across all of the case study countries, we estimate the effects of expected out-of-pocket costs of school participation on households’ decisions for their children to attend school, and show evidence that that the probability that a school-aged child attends school is higher with lower associated costs of schooling, and that the likelihood of attendance among the poorest quintiles, across all case study countries, is more adversely affected by rising costs of schooling.

Author

• Ania Chaluda, FHI 360