Search

In many low- and lower-middle-income countries, key barriers to girls’ secondary school access and learning include poverty, school inaccessibility, poor school quality and lack of gender-sensitive practices in the classroom. The non-governmental organisation, Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), provides a range of financial, pedagogical, and community-supported interventions aimed at removing these barriers in government secondary schools in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Using longitudinal data, we adopt quasi-experimental methods to examine the impact of the CAMFED programme on reducing secondary school dropout and improving test scores in English and mathematics. Results suggest that the CAMFED programme has a significant effect on both improving access and learning for the most disadvantaged adolescent girls. However, low-performing learners remain particularly at risk of dropout, necessitating further consideration and support for these girls.

A contentious debate in academic as well as policy circles relates to the growth in private schooling in the global South. While proponents highlight the superior learning outcomes of pupils in private schools, others have argued that this is merely a reflection of the more advantaged family background of private school pupils, rather than an effect of private schooling itself. We contribute to this debate by providing estimates derived from household fixed-effect models, which control for any observed or unobserved differences between government and private school pupils at the household level. We argue that these can be interpreted as an upper bound estimate of the effect of private schooling on learning. We rely on large-scale, comparable household survey data from Kenya, Uganda, India and Pakistan, focusing on children enrolled in grade 2 to 6 of primary school. Private school attendance ranges from 12% in Kenya to 33% in rural India, with substantial within-household variation. The findings show that controlling for family background almost eliminates the positive effect of private schooling in rural Pakistan and reduces it by around half in rural India, Kenya and Uganda, to about a quarter of a standard deviation. Subgroup analyses show that the effect of private schooling does not differ substantially between high- and low-SES families. We discuss implications for educational policy.

This article combines large-scale bibliometric analysis of publications on education by researchers based in sub-Saharan Africa with researchers’ accounts of their priorities and practice. Patterns in the thematic foci of the research from 48 countries in the region are considered from the perspective of international policy statements (the Education Sustainable Development Goal and the African Union’s Agenda 2063), alongside analysis of funding, co-authorship and citations. We find a large number of publications by these scholars in reputable journals which merit greater scholarly engagement. Furthermore, evidence presented in this paper challenges claims about the dominance of Northern research agendas in sub-Saharan Africa.