Even with enhanced secondary education in Africa, a large number of secondary school graduates lack decent work opportunities and end up pursuing tertiary education. However, Africa struggles to provide tertiary education to meet the increasing demand. This study focuses on graduates from a day secondary school in a rural area in western Kenya. Students from vulnerable backgrounds, even with high academic achievements, are forced to join government-appointed universities, even if they are unpopular and low in quality. In contrast, students from privileged backgrounds access popular universities even if their achievements are not comparable with government-sponsored students.
This paper evaluates how maternal education affects child mortality in the context of 52 low- and middle-income countries. The sister fixed-effects model is employed, where we compare the child mortality outcome between biological sisters who attain different numbers of educational years. We find that an additional year of maternal education is linked with a 0.4 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of child mortality (a 4.3 % reduction relative to the sample mean). Additionally, the mechanism analysis reveals that improved women’s labor market outcome, increased access to information, assortative matching, and health input allocation are possible pathways to the link between maternal education and child mortality.
Climate change is a leading barrier for SDG4 progress, particular across poorer regions which are more affected by it. This study estimates the impact of climate change on communities’ completion rates across the life-course in four sub-Saharan African countries. Our analysis is based on 2524 communities of four countries (i.e., Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea and Nigeria) using a non-parametric approach to account for heterogeneity of climate change-education linkage. We find that raising temperatures, lower rainfall, aridity and modifications on the quality of vegetation are all related to lower completion rates, with these impacts being more prominent in contextual disadvantaged communities, suggesting the urgent need for mitigating policies.