Addressing education inequality in sub-Saharan Africa^†

† This paper draws from my doctoral thesis that was submitted to the University of Malaya (Obasuyi 2018).

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of wealth inequality on education inequality in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, including by decomposing inequality across gender. Specifically, it analyzes the impact of wealth concentration on the distribution of educational attainment using a sample of cross-sectional data from the USAID Demographic Health Survey on 25 countries, and deploying the education inequality Gini, generalized Lorenz curve, and Lorenz concentration curve. Educational attainment and wealth index were estimated to capture education inequality and wealth concentration. The findings confirm that social exclusion has remained chronic in SSA. Apart from Zimbabwe, SSA have not only failed to raise incidence levels of secondary and tertiary education, but also have largely been unable to reduce education inequality. Regardless of oil and gas endowments, investments going to education have remained low in these countries, while gender disparity on educational attainment burdening females has been high in Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana and Guinea. With the exception of Comoros, wealth concentration is the prime cause of education inequality in the remaining countries. The findings call for effective policies for the poor and females to raise their education levels thereby enabling them to earn incomes to break the vicious cycle of education inequality caused by wealth inequality.

Keywords:

• education inequality
• wealth concentration
• social exclusion
• sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the two anonymous referees for their constructive comments. All errors that remain are ours. We equally acknowledge the institution of USAID Demographic Health Survey for supplying free data for the analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Folorunso Obayemi Temitope Obasuyi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6499-0574

Rajah Rasiah http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6654-3011

Notes

† This paper draws from my doctoral thesis that was submitted to the University of Malaya (Obasuyi 2018).

1 The M2 is the aggregate of financial assets geared toward savings or short-term investment (Balmer 2007).