Intergenerational educational mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Research on social mobility in developing countries has been hampered by the coresidency criterion applied to most surveys. However, a recent study showed that for educational mobility, the intergenerational correlation (IGC) suffers from significantly less bias in coresident samples, and is also more robust for comparing mobility across sub-samples, time and varying coresidency rates. This study employs the IGC and census data from 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to investigate the association between parents’ and children's educational attainment for several cohorts born between the mid-1950s and early 1990s. According to the results, the SSA average IGC during the period was 0.4, with country averages between 0.3 and 0.5, which would indicate low to medium intergenerational educational persistence. Trend estimates, however, show that the IGC rose (mobility worsened) over the decades in several countries, as it did on average for the region as a whole.