To What Extent are African Education Policies Pro-Poor?

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Periodical article

Title:	To What Extent are African Education Policies Pro-Poor?
Author:	Berthélemy, Jean-Claude
Year:	2006
Periodical:	Journal of African Economies
Volume:	15
Issue:	3
Period:	September
Pages:	434-469
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Subsaharan Africa
Subjects:	educational policy Education and Oral Traditions Politics and Government Economics and Trade
External link:	https://jae.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/3/434.full.pdf
Abstract:	This paper discusses the distributional consequences of education policies in developing countries, with a specific emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. The author shows that human capital is particularly unequally distributed in sub-Saharan African countries and in Middle East and North Africa and South Asian regions as well. To obtain this conclusion, he builds an analytical framework in which the effects of the level and the structure of human capital are separated. This provides a way to correct data for the inevitable correlation that exists between the aggregate level of human capital and its concentration. He provides further evidence, based on sub-Saharan African schooling structure data, that these countries pay, relatively speaking, little attention to primary education, to the benefit of secondary education. This bias is the result of specific institutional characteristics of sub-Saharan Africa, which are deeply rooted in its history (in particular its postcolonial legacy), demography and geography. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]