Universal Primary Education Policy Research Articles

Updates on private returns to education in Uganda: evidence from universal primary education policy

ABSTRACT This study updates private returns to education in Uganda using consumption measures as an outcome variable, focusing on obtaining estimates using instrumental variables based on the introduction of the universal primary education policy. Unlike common findings from developed countries, the evidence from this study for a low-income country suggests that returns to education are smaller for liquidity-constrained individuals than for average individuals. The finding also suggests that smaller returns are observed for self-employed farmers than self-employed workers in non-agricultural sectors. The trend, showing smaller returns for liquidity-constrained individuals, is particularly obvious among self-employed farmers.

Assessing the Impact of Universal Primary Education Policy on Gender Equality in Education in Uganda

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of Uganda’s Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy on gender equality in the realm of education. Since its inception in 1997, the UPE policy has been a cornerstone of Uganda’s educational reform, with the primary objective of offering free primary education to all children. A significant aspect of this policy has been its focus on enhancing female enrollment, in response to the historical underrepresentation of girls in education due to socio-economic, cultural, and infrastructural barriers. This study employs a comprehensive approach to assess the policy’s effectiveness in bridging the gender gap within Ugandan primary schools. By analyzing a variety of metrics, including enrollment rates, dropout rates, and academic performance, the paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the policy’s outcomes. The analysis extends beyond mere statistics to explore the qualitative aspects of the policy’s implementation, such as the provision of gender-sensitive facilities and teaching methods, which are crucial for sustaining girls’ participation in education. Furthermore, the paper examines the broader socio-economic context in which the UPE policy operates, considering factors such as poverty, child labor, and cultural norms that disproportionately affect girls’ access to education. By situating the policy within this context, the study highlights the complex interplay between educational policies and societal dynamics in shaping gender equality in education. This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on gender equality in education by offering a comprehensive evaluation of the UPE policy’s impact on female enrollment and retention in Ugandan primary schools. Through this analysis, the paper aims to provide insights into the successes and challenges of the policy, thereby informing future efforts to achieve gender parity in education.

The impact of female education on fertility: evidence from Malawi Universal Primary Education program

Abstract This paper examines the impact of female education on fertility outcomes by using the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program in Malawi as a natural experiment. The finding indicates that the UPE policy improves rural women's educational attainment by 0.42 years and an additional year of female education decreases women's number of children ever born and the number of living children by 0.39 and 0.34, respectively. An analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the decreased fertility rates are likely driven by the reduction in women's fertility preferences, the postponement of marriage, and the delay of motherhood. Contrarily, the study finds no evidence that increased female education affects women's labor force participation and the use of modern contraception.

Does Education Predict Women’s Use of Unsustainable Biomass Cooking Technologies? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14pt;">In developing countries, the dependence on traditional biomass for domestic energy consumption is one of the major causes of deforestation and environmental poverty. This paper investigates the impact of women’s education on the probability of using Unsustainable Biomass Cooking Technologies (UBCT) as the household main fuel of cooking instead of clean energy. Combining data from four rounds of Nigeria DHS conducted between 2003 and 2018, we take advantage of a natural experiment, the implementation of Uni-versal Primary Education policies in 1970, to obtain an exogenous variation in women’s education levels. Using an instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity issues, we find that women with higher levels of education are less likely to use UBCT as their primary source of cooking. This result implies that environmental policies in developing countries should rely not only on income transfers policies as suggested in the literature but also on increasing women's human capital to reduce women’s dependence on unsustainable biomass cooking practices.</span></p>

Universalization, Sustainability and “Justiceness” of Primary Education: Perspectives and Lessons from Uganda

Abstract It is through education that communities and governments can tackle political, economic, social and geographic inequalities and ills in the continent of Africa. It is for this reason that policies like the Universal Primary Education were adopted. Children have the right to basic quality education as espoused in several agreements such as the Convention of Childrens Rights of 1989 and the Sustainable Development goals. Access to quality education for success is a social justice trajectory and promotes social justice principles. This article was intended to examine the impediments in the effective implementation of Universal Primary Education policy in Uganda. The authors view the identified impediments as social injustice practices. In exploring the phenomenon, this study deployed a qualitative research approach within a constructivist paradigm. The authors located their thesis within Rawl’s perspective of social justice. This theoretical lens is fundamental and apposite in education in that social justice theorists believe that schools as social systems should create opportunities for inclusive and enabling schooling environments, and in addition provide quality education for students. This study is of great significance in that it contributes to the epistemology in the discipline of the management of universal primary education. The study yielded critical findings which can be summarized as follows: limited capitation grants, demotivated teachers, challenges related to stakeholder collaboration and coordination, communication, cooperation, engagement and consultation.

Impact of Universal Primary Education Policy on the Schooling of Girls and Children with Disabilities in Uganda

Utilizing the nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey dataset from 2016 and using the difference-in-difference technique, we compare the effect of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy on the educational attainment between girls and children with disabilities in Uganda. Although UPE is effective in bridging gender gaps, we observed no significant gaps between children with and without disabilities in poor households, indicating the difficulty parents with financial constraints face in investing in education regardless of disability. Additionally, for disabled samples, we observed a positive effect of UPE on years of schooling for full and female samples but not for poor households, indicating that simply waiving tuition fees as part of the UPE policy is not sufficient to increase access to education.

The negative health spillover effects of universal primary education policy: Ethnographic evidence from Uganda

ABSTRACT Scholars of global health have embraced universal education as a structural intervention to prevent HIV. Yet the costs of school, including fees and other ancillary costs, create an economic burden for students and their families, indicating both the challenge of realising the potential of education for preventing HIV and the ways in which the desire for education may produce vulnerabilities to HIV for those struggling to afford it. To explore this paradox, this article draws from collaborative, team-based ethnographic research conducted from June to August 2019 in the Rakai district of Uganda. Respondents reported that education is the most significant cost burden faced by Ugandan families, sometimes amounting to as much as 66% of yearly household budgets per student. Respondents further understood paying for children’s schooling as both a legal requirement and a valued social goal, and they pointed to men’s labour migrations to high HIV-prevalence communities and women’s participation in sex work as strategies to achieve that. Building from regional evidence showing young East African women participate in transactional, intergenerational sex to secure school fees for themselves, our findings point to the negative health spillover effects of Uganda’s universal schooling policies for the whole family.

Fertility Responses to Schooling Costs: Evidence from Uganda’s Universal Primary Education Policy

There is some evidence that access to schooling reduces fertility along the intensive margin in developing countries, but the transmission channels are not well understood; most education interventions impact financial costs, access, and school quality. We isolate the specific effect of child school fees on maternal fertility by studying a 1997 schooling reform in Uganda, in which the government abolished elementary school fees for up to four children per household. Families with more school-aged children were required to pay fees for the additional ones. We demonstrate that eligibility limits reduced births: women with more than four children in 1997 were 4.2 percentage points less likely to give birth to an additional child in the subsequent two years. We provide evidence that this result is driven by UPE eligibility limits, not by other factors associated with the policy or other secular changes. Fertility effects are persistent over time and survive the lifting of the eligibility limit in 2003. The policy is also associated with a temporary reduction in the desired fertility, with mothers preferring having four children or fewer during the policy period than before.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Systems of Selected Schools in Southren Ethiopia

BackgroundAlthough efforts had made to support Universal Primary Education policies implementation in Ethiopia, less consideration was given to the important contribution of clean and healthy school. This study aimed at assessing WaSH systems of primary second cycle schools in Bensa district, Southren Ethiopia, from January 2018-March 2018.MethodsA school based cross-sectional study was conducted employing muti-stage sampling method composed of schools, school principals and school children. Accordingly, 8 randomly selected schools & principals for in-depth study, and 422 randomly sampled students from grades 5th-8th. Data were collected by questionnaire, interview, focus group discussion and observation. For qualitative part, key informants were interviewed using semi structured questionnaire on schools WaSH facilities, utilization and management. Data were processed & analyzed using spreadsheet database developed for this survey.ResultsThe result showed all schools were unable to get water all the times and 37.5% of them got water from unprotected sources. Almost all indicated that their water supply not tested for its quality. On-site observation showed that no schools had hand washing facility near latrine. Latrine student ratios were below the limit of national standard. More than half of them observed to have unclean latrines and feces had seen on the floor. Almost all schools had no maintenance plan for their WSS facilities. The level of attention given by schools and local government for school WaSH was low. Financial capacity, inter-sector and stakeholder cooperation and harmonization were also very weak.ConclusionsThe study result revealed that school WaSH facilities and its management, and sanitation and hygiene conditions had got various shortcomings. Hence, school WaSH facilities, sanitation and hygiene conditions primarily require due attention and commitment of stakeholders to realize a healthy school environment.

The Long-Term Effects of Universal Primary Education: Evidence from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda

This article investigates the rollout of universal primary education (UPE) policies in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda to assess their long-term causal effects on schooling attainment. Consequently, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) to assess the effect that increased schooling helps lower adolescent sexual activity, marriage, and births, as well as adult labor force activity among women. Our findings show that the UPE policies were effective in increasing educational attainment across all three countries between 0.6 and 1.5 years of completed schooling. Additionally, we show that increased schooling induced by UPE had lowered sexual activity, child birth, and marriage rates during adolescence. We find that the effects of schooling do not significantly improve labor force participation and employment.

Comparative Analysis of Universal Primary Education Policy and Progress in India and Sri Lanka in the Era of Globalization

Sustainable Development Goals, like previous Millennium Development Goals, put strong emphasis on the inclusive and quality education for all by 2030 and directed all the nation states to make concerted efforts to ensure this. Many developing countries after the endorsement of time-bound global goals regarding education has resulted in remarkable changes in their national education policy directions by making provisions of free and compulsory education for a stipulated period. However, even today, when the global development agenda is emphasizing inclusive and quality education for all at all levels, the goal of universal primary education remains elusive for many developing countries. The aim of this study was to analyze educational policy changes and progress in universal primary education in India and Sri Lanka under the influence of global policy agenda. India and Sri Lanka are two important countries in South Asian region and both are quite proactive in their efforts towards universalization of primary education. With the help of trend analysis method, it has been observed tremendous progress has been observed in the expansion of access of primary education in these countries. However, the results indicate that the performance of Sri Lanka in primary education is far better than India and India can learn a lot from the experiences of Sri Lanka. But, the high number of out of school children and poor learning outcomes in both the countries need a radical shift in the focus of the policy planning in these countries. The study is quite critical to highlight the glaring gaps in the provision of education for all in these countries and experiences of these countries can provide instructive lessons for other countries struggling with the goal of education for all. Keywords: Universal Primary Education, Education for All, Educational Policy, Globalization, South Asia. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-8-04 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

Gender Equitable Change and the Place of Informal Networks in Uganda’s Legislative Policy Reforms

Uganda has had an uneven history and experience around gender equity policy reforms, particularly, from the late 1980s and early 1990s to-date. These range from the countrywide constitutional review processes of the early 1990s, legislative activism and reforms around domestic relations, land/property rights, and women’s access to public position, to mention but a few. While some of these gender reforms (commonly promoted through women’s collective mobilisation) were successful, other legislative initiatives faced intense resistance. This paper compares three policy cases – the 1997 Universal Primary Education policy, the 1998 legislative reform around spousal co-ownership of land and the 2010 Domestic Violence Act. Drawing on feminist institutionalism, the paper explores how gender norms operate within institutions (both formal and informal) and how institutional processes construct, reproduce or challenge gender power dynamics in policy reforms. The paper examines the place of informal networks and raises critical questions regarding ways in which women emerge as critical actors in securing and consolidating gender change, the strategies they draw upon to negotiate resistance, and whether the nature of policy reform influences the kind of resistance and (in effect) counter-strategies used to negotiate resistance to gender change. We also assess the implications these legislative processes have for activism around gender equity reforms. Findings indicate creative ways through which women draw on informal networks and networking practices to influence gender equitable change, often revealing the micro, subtly gendered dynamics that animate success or failure of a particular policy reform. We argue that the nature of policy reform, e.g. gender status policies or doctrinal policies, determines the nature and process of policy adoption.

Exploration of the private schools’role in the process of primary education formation in Tanzania after independence

[연구목적] 1961년 독립한 탄자니아는 1970년대 초등교육의 팽창이 정점에 이르나 1980년대 이르러 쇠락하다가 1990년/2000년대 국제사회의 초등교육에 대한 관심이 높아지면서 초등교육의 안정화가 나타난다. 본 연구는 탄자니아의 이러한 초등교 육 변화 양상을 이해하기 위한 토대 연구로써, 1960-1970년대 탄자니아의 초등교육형성 과정에 주목하고, 그 가운데서도 사립학교의 역할을 탐색한다. [연구방법] 이러한 연구 목적을 달성하기 위해 본 연구는 1960-1970년대 탄자니아 정부에서 발간한 1차 문서와 동 시대를 연구 배경으로 한 2차 사료에 대한 문헌연구를 진행한다. [연구결과] 1960-1970년대 탄자니아의 사립학교는 지역사회 주도의 사립 초등학교 팽창, 정부의 사립 초등학교 수용, 사립 초등학교의 국영화의 세 시기로 특징지어진다. 동 시기를 거치며 사립 초등학교는 독립직후 열악했던 정부의 학교 운영 능력과 재정 능력을 보완하였으며, 국가의 주요 교육 정책을 수행하는 데에 기여하였다. [결론] 탄자니아 정부가 실시한 사립 초등학교의 국영화는 탄자니아 교육이 직면한 현실적 한계를 극복하기 위한 방안일 뿐만 아니라 지역사회에 기반 한 공동체를 구축하려는 대안적이고 실천적인 움직임이었다. 이를 통해 탄자니아는 1970년대 안정적인 보편적 초등교육 정책을 수행할 수 있었다. 본 연구는 국내에서 역사를 통해 오늘날 아프리카 교육을 이해하고자 하는 시도의 시발점이며, 향후 지역 연구 혹은 비교 연구로써 아프리카의 교육을 이해하거나 교육개발협력 분야에서 그것을 이해하는 데 중요한 의의를 제공할 것이다.[Purpose] In Tanzania, the expansion of primary education peaked in the 1970s, but declined in the 1980s. As the international community became interested in primary education, however, in the 1990s and 2000s, the expansion of primary education became stable again. This study is a basic study for understanding the changes of primary education in Tanzania, focusing on the process of primary education formation in Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s and exploring for the role of private schools in that process. [Methods] To this end, this study analyzes the policy documents published by the Tanzanian Government and secondary literature on the corresponding period. [Results] Tanzanian private schools in the 1960s and the 1970s are characterized by three different periods: 1) private primary school expansion led by community-based societies, 2) private primary school acceptance by the Tanzanian Government, and 3) private primary school nationalization. Passing through these periods, private primary schools supplemented the Government’s poor capability of school operation immediately after independence. Moreover, they contributed to implementing the main national education policies. [Conclusion] Private school nationalization led by the Tanzanian Government was not only a way to overcome practical limitations faced by Tanzanian education itself, but also an alternative and a practical movement which tried to establish a community-based society. As a result, it allowed Tanzania to implement a stable universal primary education policy in the 1970s. This study is the starting point of attempting to understand the education of Africa through history. This study will provide important significance for studying education in Africa and for the field of educational development cooperation as a regional study and comparative study.

Fertility Responses to Schooling Costs: Evidence from Uganda's Universal Primary Education Policy

There is some evidence that access to schooling reduces fertility along the intensive margin in developing countries, but the transmission channels are not well understood; most education interventions impact financial costs, access, and school quality. We isolate the specific effect of child school fees on maternal fertility by studying a 1997 schooling reform in Uganda, in which the government abolished elementary school fees for up to four children per household. Families with more school-aged children were required to pay fees for the additional ones. We demonstrate that eligibility limits reduced births: women with more than four children in 1997 were 4.2 percentage points less likely to give birth to an additional child in the subsequent two years. We provide evidence that this result is driven by UPE eligibility limits, not by other factors associated with the policy or other secular changes. Fertility effects are persistent over time and survive the lifting of the eligibility limit in 2003. The policy is also associated with a temporary reduction in the desired fertility, with mothers preferring having four children or fewer during the policy period than before.

How Does Female Education Reduce Adolescent Pregnancy and Improve Child Health?: Evidence from Uganda’s Universal Primary Education for Fully Treated Cohorts

This paper examines the impact of female education on adolescent fertility, the health status of their children, and the mechanism through which education affects these outcomes. To address the endogeneity of educational attainment, we utilise Universal Primary Education policy (UPE) in Uganda. Education is instrumented by the interaction between across-cohorts differences in exposure to UPE and the differences in its effective benefits across districts with varying pre-programme rates of completing primary education. We particularly focus on the fully treated cohorts whose fees were abolished before they entered school. Results show that attending an additional year of schooling reduces the probability of marriage and that of giving birth before age 18 by 7.0–7.2 percentage points. Among those who become mothers, educated women use maternal care and infant immunisation more often, and had lower probability that their child dies before 18 months after birth. These effects are likely to arise because educated women tend to be literate and prefer to have fewer children. They exhibit better knowledge about reproductive issues. Weak evidence is found for an increase in the probability of working in the non-agricultural sector. No evidence is, however, found for assortative mating, and evidence for improved bargaining power is mixed.

Interprovincial differences in labour force distribution and utilization based on educational attainment in Indonesia, 2002–2015

AbstractIntroducing an employment variable with five levels of educational attainment per capita and employing inequality decomposition, this study addresses three questions. How does labour force vary by education and provinces? How does labour force utilization vary by education and provinces? What are the potential causes of differences? We find that the no‐primary‐education group is more endowed in less‐developed provinces and allocated most unequally among education groups across provinces, despite past universal primary education policies. The senior‐secondary‐education group with the largest labour share is a growing concern due to the lower employment rate and largest interprovincial inequality.

Education and teenage childbirth in Uganda

PurposeThe role of increased schooling on teenage childbirth has been expansively studied especially in developed countries. However, caveats remain in the case of low-income countries especially Sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the impact of increased schooling on the probability of first childbirth at 15 years or younger, 16-17, 18-19, and 20 years or older, in the important context of Uganda – a country with one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis uses recent data from the nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey for Uganda conducted in 2011. The authors then adopt a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, estimated using instrumental variables techniques that exploit the exogenous change in schooling impelled by the universal primary education policy enacted in 1997 in Uganda. The empirical approach compares the fertility outcomes for women born in 1984-1992 (i.e. exposed to the policy) to those born in 1973-1981 (i.e. non-exposed).FindingsThe authors find that a one-year increase in schooling lowers the probability of first childbirth at age the age of 15 years or younger, 16-17, 18-19, and 20 years or older by nearly 8.2, 9.2, 9.4, and 9.5 percentage points, respectively. Also, pathways through which education impacts teenage motherhood included information access through the media, increased literacy, prenatal care utilization, marital status, and unhealthy sexual behavior.Originality/valueThe paper uses nationally representative survey data to scrutinize the causal influence of schooling on the probability of first childbirth using the 1997 universal primary education in Uganda as a natural experiment to identify the impact of schooling. The study recommends that expanding primary schooling opportunities for girls may be an effective strategy toward accelerated reductions in teenage fertility in Uganda.

Does Keeping Adolescent Girls in School Protect Against Sexual Violence? Quasi-Experimental Evidence From East and Southern Africa

PurposeWe examine the relationship between educational attainment in adolescence on young women's lifetime experience of sexual violence in Malawi and Uganda. MethodsExposure to Universal Primary Education policies in the mid-1990s serves as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of schooling on women's subsequent experience of sexual violence using an instrumented regression discontinuity design and Demographic and Health Survey data. ResultsWe find a one-year increase in grade attainment leads to a nine-percentage point reduction (p < .05) in the probability of ever experiencing sexual violence in a sample of 1,028 Ugandan women (aged 18–29 years), an estimate which is considerably larger than observational estimates. We find no effect of grade attainment on ever experiencing sexual violence among a sample of 4,413 Malawian women (aged 19–31 years). In addition, we find no relationship between grade attainment and 12-month sexual violence in either country. Analysis of pathways indicates increased grade attainment increases literacy and experience of premarital sex in Malawi and reduces the probability of ever being married in both countries. ConclusionsKeeping girls in school results in a number of benefits for young women; however, protects against lifetime experience of sexual violence only in Uganda. It is possible that overall higher grade attainment, particularly at secondary school levels is driving this effect in Uganda. More research on this relationship is needed, as well as on effective interventions, particularly those which can be taken to scale related to enhancing the quality and quantity of education.

Education Policy and Under-Five Survival in Uganda: Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys

This study seeks to examine the influence of mothers’ schooling accomplishments on child mortality outcomes by exploiting the exogenous variability in schooling prompted by the 1997 universal primary education (UPE) policy in Uganda. The UPE policy, which eliminated school fees for all primary school children, provides an ideal setting for investigating the causal effect of the subsequent burst in primary school enrollment on child mortality outcomes in Uganda. The analysis relies on data from three waves of the nationally representative Uganda Demographic and Health Survey conducted in 2000/01, 2006, and 2011. To lessen the bias created by the endogenous nature of education, this study employs the mother’s age at UPE implementation as an instrumental variable in the two-stage least squares model. The empirical analysis shows that one-year spent in school translates to a 2.24 percentage point decline in under-five mortality as observed at survey date and a 1.58 percentage point reduction in infant mortality even after accounting for potential confounding variables. These upshots are weakly robust to a variety of sample sizes and different model specifications. Overall, the results suggest that increasing the primary schooling possibilities for women might contribute towards a reduction in child mortality in low-income countries with high child mortality rates.

Does community involvement affect teacher effort? Assessing learning impacts of Free Primary Education in Kenya

While the impressive school participation impacts of Universal Primary Education policies in Sub-Saharan Africa are widely recognized, attempts to measure learning gains from schooling remain minimal. Utilizing a unique international test score dataset, we measure and explain grade six reading and math learning outcomes in Kenya. By comparing competences between public and private schools before and after the introduction of free primary education, we find large achievement declines and inequalities based on gender and socioeconomic status. The declines are associated with low teacher efforts and community disengagement. Policy studies on community involvement in schools will likely lead to improved learning.