Child Fostering and Children’s Human Capital in Ouagadougou

Questions continue to arise about the benefits and challenges of child fostering on children’s human capital, particularly in West Africa. For technical and operational purposes, empirical studies have generally considered fostered children as a homogeneous group, despite the well-examined complexity of this matter. This paper aims to provide a more insightful view of the potential effects of child fostering on educational outcomes in the capital city of Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso. Beyond the comparison of children who have been fostered in the past to their own siblings, this paper analyzes the heterogeneity of child fostering by considering such factors as sex, and the kinship relationship between the foster household head and the child’s biological mother. Probit models are used with interaction terms. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess the consistency of our results. The results show that a negative effect of child fostering remains, but girls who were fostered after 10 years of age appear to be most disadvantaged compared with their peers after controlling for all other factors.