The combined effect of free and compulsory lower secondary education on educational attainment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Greater educational attainment has vast economic, health, and intergenerational benefits, yet less than half children in sub-Saharan Africa complete lower secondary school. In contrast to primary education, there is limited research on the impact of national policies at the secondary level on educational attainment. A significant number of low-income countries continue to charge tuition for secondary education and a majority do not make secondary school compulsory. This study is the first to simultaneously assess reforms to tuition-free and compulsory education at the lower secondary level. Using a novel global dataset on education policies and data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we used a differences-in-differences approach to examine how the introduction of tuition-free and compulsory lower secondary education policies in seven sub-Saharan African countries affected grades completed and starting secondary education by sex, wealth quintile, and rural/urban residence. Results show that making lower secondary education compulsory, in addition to tuition-free, had a significantly larger impact on educational attainment compared to providing tuition-free lower secondary alone. Exposure to tuition-free, compulsory lower secondary increased girls’ average educational attainment by 1.6 grades, and boys’ attainment by 1.4 grades, compared to cohorts exposed to only tuition-free. Girls and boys were also 13.5 and 14 percentage points more likely to complete some secondary, respectively, than their peers in countries that had made lower secondary education free, but not compulsory. Children from families in the lower wealth quintiles had a significantly larger improvement in progressing to secondary education when education was both tuition-free and compulsory.