Poverty and Children’s Schooling in Urban and Rural Senegal

This paper presents findings of an investigation into the effects of living-standards and relative poverty on children’s schooling in urban and rural areas of Senegal. To measure living standards, we apply a multiple-indicator, multiple-cause (MIMIC) factor-analytic model to a set of proxy variables collected in the 2000 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey and extract an estimate of the relative standard of living for each household. Using this estimate, we find that in Senegal’s urban areas, living standards exert substantial influence on three measures of schooling: Whether a child has ever attended school; whether he or she has completed at least four grades of primary school; and whether he or she is currently enrolled. In rural areas of Senegal, however, the effects are weaker and achieve statistical significance only for the wealthiest fifth of rural households. Two educational inequalities persist with living standards held constant. First, the advantages enjoyed by urban families in Senegal remain considerable: Even the poorest fifth of urban children are more likely than rural children to have attended school, to have completed four years or more of primary education, and to be currently enrolled. Second, gender gaps in schooling are pervasive and are only modestly influenced by standards of living. In both urban and rural areas of Senegal, girls suffer from marked disadvantages relative to boys in all three measures of schooling. In wealthier urban households, girls’ disadvantages are smaller, but not completely eliminated. Furthermore, no systematic reduction in female disadvantage is apparent in rural Senegal, even in the uppermost stratum of households. To judge from these findings, in Senegal income growth alone is unlikely to close the schooling gap between urban and rural areas or between boys and girls. As developing countries continue to urbanize, national debates about poverty increasingly will have to consider its urban as well as its rural manifestations. To date, the urgent needs of rural areas have occupied policy attention to such an extent that urban poverty has gone unrecognized. Yet, as the Panel on Urban Population Dynamics (2003) has shown in its analyses of health, poor urban dwellers often live in conditions that are little better (and are sometimes worse) than those found in the countryside. The question arises whether for the poor, the “urban advantage” in children’s schooling might also prove to be elusive. In this paper, we take a closer look at the inequalities that can affect children’s schooling in urban and rural settings in order to better understand urban–rural differences. Using data from the 2000 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) for Senegal, we focus on three indicators of schooling: Whether a child has ever attended school, whether he or she has completed at least four grades of primary school, and whether he or she is currently enrolled. Of particular interest in the analysis is whether higher household living standards tend to improve educational opportunities for girls. Despite decades of academic and policy attention to poverty in developing countries, surprisingly few data sets give educational researchers much purchase on the concept of living standards. Although exceptions exist—notably the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Surveys—surveys with detailed information on children’s schooling have not often gathered comparably detailed data on household incomes and consumption expenditures. The MICS program is no exception to the rule. Users of the MICS are thus left with little alternative but to fashion an index of living standards from the few proxy variables that are included in these surveys, which range from ownership of consumer durables to crude assessments of the quality of housing. The past decade has seen a lively debate in the literature on the merits of alternative statistical techniques that use such proxies. We explore one of the more promising approaches for distilling the proxies into a living-standards index, termed MIMIC (multiple–indicator, multiple–cause) models, which are a variant of confirmatory-factor analysis. The MIMIC approach requires that variables serving as indicators of living standards be distinguished from those serving as determinants of living standards. In this way, the method brings a helpful theoretical structure to the estimation of living-standards indexes and imposes a measure of discipline on the empirical results. We apply the approach separately to the urban and rural households of the Senegal survey, and from these sector-specific estimates, we develop urbanand rural-specific rankings of living standards. We explore whether in each setting, relative living standards make a difference to children’s schooling. The paper is organized as follows: The first section situates our analysis in the wider international debate on how best to gauge progress in children’s education. The MICS data for Senegal are discussed and descriptive statistics presented on the measures of children’s schooling and the explanatory variables used in the multivariate models. In the third section, we provide an overview of the theories and statistical issues that must be confronted in fashioning defensible measures of living standards from the crude raw materials at hand. We summarize our thinking in a multiple-equation system that links living standards to schooling and then present the multivariate results. MONITORING PROGRESS IN EDUCATION Since 1990, when the “World Declaration on Education for All” was signed in Jomtien, Thailand, and the “World Summit for Children (WSC)” was staged in New York, efforts to promote children’s educational participation and attainment have been given high priority by many international organizations, donors, and governments. The commitment to children’s schooling perceptibly deepened over the decade and was reaffirmed at decade’s end by the Millennium Development Declaration of 2000, which was followed by a burst of activity defining educational goals and quantifying targets and indicators of progress. The two targets for schooling specified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are that “by the