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Mothers’ Non-Farm Entrepreneurship and Child Secondary Education in Rural Ghana

Janssens, Charlotte; Van Den Broeck, Goedele; Maertens, Miet; Lambrecht, Isabel

2018

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Title

Mothers’ Non-Farm Entrepreneurship and Child Secondary Education in Rural Ghana

Keywords

While an important share of the rural population in Sub-Saharan Africa owns a non-farm enterprise (NFE), it is unclear how these businesses, especially among female owners, contribute to rural development. This study investigates the missing link between rural NFEs and children’s education in developing countries. Using nationally representative data for Ghana and instrumental variable regressions that pass weak and overidentification restrictions, we estimate the impact of mother’s non-farm entrepreneurship on the propensity of child secondary school enrolment. We find a strong significant positive effect of 10.6% points, corresponding to a relative increase of more than 25%. We find a positive effect on Junior High School enrolment but not on Senior High School enrolment, which relates to lower expenses and a better spread in payment for Junior High School education. The school-improving effect of mother’s non-farm entrepreneurship is equally strong for boys and girls and for high- and low-educated mothers, and stronger for poorer households. While most of NFEs are small-scale and informal, our results show that even these businesses result in increased investments in child schooling and directly contribute to development. The results imply that NFEs entail the potential to stimulate child schooling among children of low-educated and poor mothers and thereby reduce inequality in rural education.

Author(s)

Janssens, Charlotte
Van Den Broeck, Goedele
Maertens, Miet
Lambrecht, Isabel

Subject(s)

International Development

Issue Date

1/29/2018

Publication Type

Report

Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.267302

Record Identifier

https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/267302

Language

English

Total Pages

23

Record Appears in

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven > Division of Bioeconomics, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences > Working Papers

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