Rayza Zander on Temperature and Educational Attendance in Sub-Saharan Africa
About
This study has focused on the effect of weather on the enrollment of children at primary educational institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Temperature could affect agricultural income, which in turn could influence families’ choices around time allocation for their children, including school attendance. Past literature has found effects in local parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, but this is the first study that examines the effect on a larger scale.
Results
The study ultimately found no evidence of a correlation between temperature deviations and percentages of primary education enrollment in the countries examined. To establish this result, the study used panel-data on most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa together with weather data from the GDL and educational enrollment rates from the World Bank.
In this figure the bars show the proportion of the total days from all years examined (1989-2022) that had an average temperature that falls within the presented intervals. The line presents the percentages of every combination of country and year that has one day within that interval. The graph shows the variety in the temperature between the countries in SSA.
In figure 2 the results are given in a coefficient plot. None of the temperature bins have estimates that are significantly different from zero. These estimates are with the control variables included. The thesis used five temperature bins, for the 18-21 bin no value was estimated for statistical purposes and therefore is not included. The results indicate that there is no evidence that, one average, one extra day in these temperature bins compared to an extra day in the 18-21 bin has an effect on the primary enrollment rate.
Concluding remarks
Although no significant results were found, there were plenty of limitations in the study, including the use of country-wide data. More fine-grained data based on for instance the subnational level could lead to different results.
