Obstacles to Secondary School Completion in Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: Broken Promises - Youth and the Benefits of Schooling

Proposal

Target 4.1 of the Education Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) states that by 2030 “all girls and boys [will] complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education”. However, it is already recognized that neither universal primary education, much less universal secondary education (USE), will be achieved by 2030 (UNESCO 2022). Among all countries, several in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lag the most.
Among countries that lag, not all lag in the same way. Some countries have relatively low ever-enrollment, while others achieve almost universal enrollment of all children. Some countries retain as many as 80% of children until secondary completion. Other countries experience very low levels of retention. Some countries experience low retention during primary school, while in other countries children fail to make the transition from one level of education to the next. Some SSA countries have a particularly severe problem with children being overage for the grade they have attained. That is, they suffer from poor timely-progress: late enrollment, grade repetition, or leaving school for some time before returning. As a result of these variations in ever-enrollment, retention, and timely-progress, the locus of exclusion from education varies from country to country.
We will use the proximate determinants of secondary completion to examine the conditional transitions through the educational structure to determine the obstacles to achieving USE in 14 SSA countries.
Data and Methods
We use data from household listings of: 1) Demographic and Health Surveys; and 2) Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. We selected countries that have at least two survey rounds with the most recent round conducted in 2017 or later and the earlier round conducted at least 10 years prior to the recent round. We determine the highest school grade each family member has completed using just four questions (Author 2014). In addition, other background characteristics, e.g. age and gender, were asked.
We use an extended version of the proximate determinants of educational attainment framework (Author 2014), considering young people one- to four-years past the statutory age of completing secondary school. The age group included depends on the age of enrollment and the number of years of pre-tertiary education. To illustrate, consider a country where the statutory age of enrollment is 6 years, and there are 12 years of pre-tertiary education. The age group included will be 6+12+1=19 through 6+12+4=22. The framework is mathematically coherent. The secondary school completion rate (SSCR) is the product of the rate of ever-enrollment in school; retention in school until the end of secondary, or until the young person is in the age group considered and still in school; and timely-progress, the likelihood that young people in the age group who are still in school will have completed secondary education:
Ever-Enrollment × Retention × Timely-Progress = SSCR.
This can be further divided into the conditional probability of making the transition of each educational step. That is: ever-enrollment among all children in the age group; retention through primary among those who ever-enrolled; timely-progress through primary school; completion of primary; enrollment in lower secondary among those who completed primary; and so on. This approach also allows us to compute the primary school completion rate and the lower-secondary completion rate.
Results
Results for 14 SSA countries have been obtained. In 2017 through 2022 the SSCR of these countries ranged from 3% to 52%. The rank order of the SSCR of these countries in the earliest available year is very similar to their rank order in the most recent year available.
However, the rank order of the steps through the educational structure is not necessarily consistent with the rank order of the SSCR. Here we present preliminary results for Nigeria and Ethiopia illustrating just two different pathways countries follow to the level of secondary completion attained. For instance, the country with the highest SSCR (52% in 2021), Nigeria, ranks only fifth in ever-enrollment: about 81% of Nigerian children enrolled in the first year of primary school. Nigeria achieves relatively high secondary completion because more than 90% of children who enter school make each subsequent educational step from retention through primary school, through transitions between levels of education, and finally retention through upper-secondary. On the other hand, Ethiopia, a country with a slightly higher level of ever-enrollment (84%), has a much lower SSCR (13% in 2019) because of relatively low retention. Many children drop out early: of those who enter school, only about 64% stay through to the end of primary. Moreover, of those who complete lower-secondary school, just 59% manage to enter upper-secondary. Ethiopia also has problems with timely-progress through the levels of education. Some children who are at an age where they should have completed upper-secondary are still in primary school. Overall, just 42% of children who are still in school have completed secondary in a timely fashion.
Conclusion
Different countries experience exclusion from education at different stages. Some experience early exclusion – children never enter school or drop out soon after entering. Some experience later exclusion – most children enter and remain in school through lower-secondary, but then fail to make the transition to upper-secondary, perhaps because of work (mainly boys) or for social protection or early marriage (mainly girls) (Mensch et al. 2003; Sultana 2008).
UNESCO (2014) suggests that most SSA countries must focus on expanding primary education “because of population growth”. While population growth is an issue, in some SSA countries primary education still does not accommodate all children of school age, as illustrated by the failure to enroll children (four countries have ever-enrollment below 70%). Also, poor timely-progress, such as seen in Ethiopia, suggests inefficient systems with low levels of learning (Moore et al. 2008). In some cases, high stakes examinations prevent children from completing a level (Furuta, Schofer & Wick 2021).
In this paper we will explore patterns and differences in transitions through education for 14 SSA countries. We will consider the rank order correlations to illustrate how different countries have different patterns of exclusion from education.

Authors

• Ray Langsten, Social Research Center / American Univ in Cairo

• Fatma Abdelkhalek, Assiut University, Faculty of Commerce