UPE, Twenty Years Later: Evidence from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda

• In Event: Education Equity Research Initiative: Equity at the Policy Level

Proposal

This paper evaluates the long term effects of the provision of universal primary education in three East African countries, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda a little over twenty years since implementation. Universal Primary Education (UPE) is a policy that was implemented in 1994 in Ethiopia and Malawi and in 1997 in Uganda that provided its primary education aged children with free access to schooling, whereas in prior years, schooling was provided with a direct cost to the parents in the form of tuition fees. As such, the UPE policy creates a natural discontinuity in access to schooling between birth cohorts of individuals who were eligible at the time of implementation and those who missed the cutoff for free access to primary schooling.

The natural discontinuity allows us to identify the causal effect of schooling, via expansion of primary schooling, on long-term labor market, health, and behavioral outcomes among those individuals who were eligible for free primary education relative to those born right before the eligibility cutoff. Specifically, in Ethiopia and Malawi, individuals born on or after 1981 would be eligible for UPE by the time they are 13 years old. In Uganda, the same would be true of those born on or after 1984. However, those born in 1980 or before in Ethiopia and Malawi, and those born in 1983 or before in Uganda, would not be eligible for UPE. As a result, we are able to identify the causal effects of the policy on educational completion, by deriving the effects of UPE from differences between two similarly aged cohorts who differ in their UPE eligibility status.

The research objectives of this paper are to assess the efficacy of the UPE policies in the aforementioned countries in increasing educational attainment as a direct impact. In addition, we investigate indirect pathways through which the UPE policy may affect longer term outcomes that are tied to individuals’ schooling outcomes such as success in the labor market as adults, adolescent sexual and marital outcomes, HIV prevalence, and intergenerational educational outcomes (children’s likelihood of attendance and being on track in their grade progression). We draw the analytic data from two sources, the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) and USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The final goal of this paper is to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the roll out of UPE at a national scale in relation to the realized labor market, health, and behavioral benefits across 20 birth cohorts from prior to and following implementation.

Authors

• Wael Moussa, FHI 360

• Carina Omoeva, FHI 360