No abstract

As evidenced in Western rich countries, Asia, and Latin America, lower fertility allows couples to invest more in each of their children's schooling. This postulate is the key rationale of family planning policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, most studies on Africa have found no correlation or even a positive relationship between the number of children in a family and their educational attainment. These mixed results are usually explained by African family solidarity and resource transfers that might reduce pressures on household resources occasioned by many births as well as methodological problems that have afflicted much research on the region. Our study aims to assess the impact of family size on children's schooling in Ouagadougou (capital of Burkina Faso), using a better measure of household budget constraints and taking into account the simultaneity of fertility and schooling decisions. In contrast to most prior studies on sub-Saharan Africa, we find a net negative effect of sibship size on the level of schooling achieved by children--one that grows stronger as they progress through the educational system.

La prégnance de réseaux de solidarités familiales est couramment invoquée dans la littérature pour expliquer pourquoi la relation observée en Afrique subsaharienne entre le nombre d’enfants et leur scolarisation ne correspond pas aux prédictions des modèles théoriques. En pouvant confier leurs enfants à la parentèle ou bénéficier d’un appui financier des membres de la famille élargie pour payer les frais de scolarité, les couples n’auraient pas à arbitrer entre la « quantité » et la « qualité » de leurs enfants. Cependant, faute de données adéquates, cette hypothèse explicative reste insuffisamment explorée sur le plan empirique. En mobilisant des données originales (Observatoire de population de Ouagadougou, Enquête rétrospective Demtrend 2012), cette étude évalue, à l’aide de modèles de régression logistique, l’effet combiné des réseaux familiaux et de la taille de la fratrie sur la scolarisation des enfants dans les quartiers périphériques de Ouagadougou. Les résultats montrent que les familles de grande taille bénéficient d’un appui plus fréquent des réseaux familiaux pour la scolarisation. De plus, les réseaux familiaux seraient en mesure de compenser l’effet négatif d’un nombre élevé d’enfants sur la scolarisation, mais seulement pour une partie de la population qui exclut les plus pauvres.

No abstract

Using original data collected in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, this study investigates evidence for the competing theories that fertility reductions increase children's education through either the quantity-quality tradeoff (intentionally choosing smaller families to make greater investments in education and other indicators of child quality) or resource dilution (having more children reduces resources available per child, regardless of intentionality of family size). The results provide evidence for both hypotheses: children having four or fewer siblings were significantly more likely to be enrolled in school if their mothers had intentionally stopped childbearing relative to those whose mothers wanted more children but whose childbearing was limited by subfecundity. The difference between intentional and unintentional family limitation was not significant for parities greater than five. In addition, the relationship between number of siblings and their schooling is negative, regardless of the intentionality of family-size limitation, but the strength of this negative relationship is approximately twice as high among children whose mothers intentionally limited fertility (reflecting both selection and dilution effects) than among children whose mothers were subfecund (reflecting the pure dilution effect).