The determinants of household’s primary schooling decisions in the Gambia

Abstract

Even though it is recognized and accepted world-wide that primary education is a right for all children, primary education in the Gambia is free but not yet compulsory. Parents in particular and households in general are still bearing indirect costs in the education of their children on items such as uniforms, exercise books, pens, pencils, shoes, school bags, lunches and others. The key function of education in our modem societies makes it increasingly essential and intuitively crucial in terms of resources allocation and income distribution at household level. Hence, the decisions to enroll children become trivial since the scarce resources available to the household should be utilized at the optimum level possible. Various literature have overlooked the issue of children's schooling decisions at household levels. They nearly all combined child labor and child schooling and more emphasis were laid on child labor. The overall objective of these researches differs from this one in the sense that they were rather comparing child labor and child schooling with child schooling identified as the opportunity costs of child labor. Even though a similar study has yet to be commissioned in the Gambia. The objective of this study is to find out the various socioeconomic factors, which influence the choice of parents and households to enroll their children to school. For this purpose, three specific hypotheses are tested. First, the number of siblings is expected to have a negative impact on households' schooling decisions. Second, parents' education is considered an important determinant of children enrollment in school. Third, child schooling opportunities is explained by the costs of education to households.