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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)
Issue Date
Jan 29 2018
Publication Type
Report
DOI and Other Identifiers
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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