Household Change and Rural School Enrollment in Malawi and Kenya

Abstract

This study examines school enrollment in two sub-Saharan African nations, Malawi and Kenya. The article advances a refined family economy theoretical framework for understanding variations in school enrollment. It recasts family economy frameworks to consider not only how the household institution mediates a broad social change, but also how the family institution itself may be influenced by a macroinstitutional change. The findings suggest that household structural changes, as well as changes in parents' activities and perceptions, help explain enrollment practices in rural Malawi and Kenya.

NOTES

Notes

¹ This study focuses on the household unit consisting of all persons living in the same residence rather than the broader family unit. For purposes of this study, the household includes all adults and children living in a specific residence. The household does not include older children residing elsewhere (but children attending boarding primary or secondary schools are considered members of the household).

² This figure was calculated from two influential planning publications of the Government of Malawi. First, the population doubled from 4 to 8 million (Government of Malawi 1992). Second, the proportion of Malawian households with access to land needed to meet basic needs (two or more hectares) declined from 71 percent to 13 percent (Government of Malawi 1993). Thus, in the late 1960s, about 1 million people relied on nonfarm income while, by 1990, nearly 7 million people did.

³ The U.S. Agency for International Development had funded a major social mobilization effort, Girls Attainment in Basic Literacy and Education, which initiated pilot programs among the Yao in the Southern Lakeshore Region in 1994 and then expanded nationally over the next several years. Moreover, about half (9 of 20) of local authorities reported in interviews that a contingent of Islamic leaders from other African nations had toured the Lakeshore Region in the previous year, exhorting villagers to enroll children in school (notes from interviews, December 1996).

⁴ Fuller (1991) describes Malawi's education system as having two tiers: (1) low-quality primary schooling for the masses and (2) high-quality secondary schooling for the elite. Other scholars have cited the emphasis that Malawi's first president, Dr. Kamuzu Banda, placed on the country's elite boarding school, Kamuzu Academy (referred to as “The Eton of Africa”) as a further evidence of an elitist education system.

⁵ Most Yao adhere to Islam, but other structural and cultural traditions such as lack of schools, long distances to schools, matrilinearity, matrilocality, and coming-of-age ceremonies jando and chinamwali may have additionally affected interest in schooling (Davison and Kanyuka 1992; Miller 1998).

⁶ Interview on March 17, 1997. The local village chief reported that the famous missionary Robert Laws had cursed the village because the men of the village had fallen asleep when they were supposed to be serving as lookouts for the mission, which feared an attack from another tribe.

⁷ In Kilifi, 63 percent of survey respondents were Christian, 22 percent were Muslim, and 15 percent stated they had no religion or “traditional African” religious beliefs.

⁸ Lists were available through the National Statistical Office in Malawi and the Central Bureau of Statistics (and its district offices) in Kenya. We used a measure of isolation, traveling time, as a stratifier, randomly selecting half the locations with a traveling time greater than 12 hours from where the research team was housed, and half with a traveling time of less than 12 hours. Within village locations, we tried to get a representative sample by using maps to “cover” the geographical demarcation of the area, skipping three to four neighboring households and refusing local escorts. In Kenya, we conducted some interviews at local marketplaces where a number of household heads spend their days. The survey included two distinct subdistricts in Mangochi, nearly 400 households, which were combined for this analysis.

⁹ Only 27 female leaders were interviewed: (1) 2 village headwomen in Malawi; (2) 9 head teachers and teachers; (3) 13 members of committees, cooperatives, and women's groups in both countries; and (4) 3 representatives of NGOs.

¹⁰ Specifically, 24 of 28 local authorities interviewed in Malawi stated that piecework labor was a major source of supplemental or emergency income for villagers. Piecework labor contracts were not as prevalent in Kenya where none of the 10 authorities interviewed in Mer region said piecework labor contracts were prevalent, while 7 out of 10 authorities in Kilifi said that piecework labor contracts were only prevalent during times of drought.

¹¹ We used survey questions to identify child domestic workers and children with severe or chronic illnesses; both were excluded from this analysis.

¹² In alternative model specifications, we variously substituted or added a measure of overall household size. The overall correlation between household size and number of school-age children was relatively high, r = .72. We elected to include only the number of school-age children to avoid the potential for multicollinearity.

¹³ The cost of schooling dramatically increases after the transition to secondary school. Moreover, the economic cost of forgoing the benefits of child labor, within the household or informal sector, increase as children become older and more productive. Socially, older children may find it difficult to delay participating in initiation ceremonies marking their transition to adulthood until completing primary school.

¹⁴ De facto single-parent households are those where one parent (the father) is absent for more than six months of the year, and the other parent (the mother) makes the important economic and educational decisions concerning children. Some women in polygamous marriages are de facto single mothers, as are women whose husbands are migrant laborers within or outside the country.

¹⁵ We found a wide range of household structures in our research. In interviews, we found that household structures have been influenced by many factors including male migration, HIV/AIDS-related deaths, and multiple marriages and divorces. While it is difficult to comprehend how all these factors influence enrollment practices, this variable serves as a proxy for many possible alternative household structures.

¹⁶ In 1996 and 1997, neither Malawi nor Kenya officially required parents to pay school fees. All secondary school fees, room, and board were considered as mandatory. Our survey recorded amounts spent on a per child basis for items such as books, lamps, batteries, and school clothing, tutoring, extracurricular classes, testing, and contributions to school maintenance funds (the largest source of school spending in Kenya, but nonexistent in Malawi). In reality, parental spending varied considerably across regions within Malawi and Kenya. In Kenya, most schools in the Meru region reported that nearly 100 percent of parents contributed to school maintenance funds while schools in the Kilifi area reported very low rates of compliance with schools' requests for contributions (some parents gave partial contributions while others did not contribute at all). Therefore, we used regional means to determine which families demonstrated the most commitment through high levels of per child discretionary school spending.

¹⁷ Casual labor includes short-term, informal labor arrangements for pay or for food. Ethnographic interviews and observations suggest that children are often included in family piecework arrangements. That children work does not constitute a family economy argument unless the structure of work prohibits children from enrolling in school. While our survey questions did not explore the various work structures associated with family income diversification, our ethnographic observations revealed that piecework opportunities were not typically available in and around the rural villages we visited. For example, in several households in one Malawian village, the male head and male sons 10 years and older traveled by foot to Mozambique to engage in monthly, work-for-food arrangements with a private plantation owner. Obviously, children cannot attend school under such arrangements.

¹⁸ Malawian and Kenyan families reported a wide variety of religious identities including no religion, two distinct versions of Islam, and a vast array of Christian denominations and sects. We conducted an exploratory research and found no significant differences in enrollment patterns across the various forms of Christianity or between nonreligious and religious households. The only significant differences were between Muslim and non-Muslim, which we have reported here. In both nations, Muslims are concentrated in certain locations—Mangochi, Malawi and Kilifi, Kenya—suggesting that the variable could be a proxy for other regional differences (see footnote 4). But there is an overlap between regional and religious categories (not all Malawian Muslims live in Mangochi and not all Mangochi villages are Muslim) and, therefore, we simply report the Muslim variable which can be interpreted as either a religious or a regional effect, or both.

¹⁹ Using the STATA command VIF, we checked the tolerance and variance inflation factor for each independent variable and found no evidence of multicollinearity.

²⁰ As the expected curvilinear relationship did not hold (e.g., both age and age squared have positive signs), we retested the equation without the quadratic term to confirm the significant, positive effect of age.