Africa Education Paper : Environmental goods collection and children’s schooling in Kenya

About the paper

Environmental goods collection and children’s schooling: evidence from Kenya. S. Wagura; W. Nyangena, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 2009

Schoolchild in Kenya by TeachandLearn on Flickr

This study examines the link between environmental goods collection and children’s schooling in Kenya. It proposes that, as resources becomes more scarce, households will invest more time in collecting them and this will adversely affect the children’s school attendance and performance.

The main findings of the study are:

• there is a positive correlation between resource collection and school attendance
• children’s school attendance and progress is negatively affected by scarcity of natural resources through the increased work that results from scarcity of natural resources
• the effects of resource collection work on school performance were not significant which suggest that performance mostly depends on the child’s ability
• there is a positive relationship between performance and the type of school the child attends
• the presence of women being involved in resource collection work positively increases school attendance

The paper concludes that there is a need to reduce the child’s involvement in resource collection in several ways:

• increasing water supply may reduce the time children spend queuing for water at the source of water
• for the areas with access to village tap, a good solution can be increasing the number of village taps to a short distance from each other which will reduce the time children spend in queuing and travelling
• good management of existing water resources can be encouraged through water conservation measures, which also helps saving children’s time
• to reduce the time children spend to collect firewood, the available alternatives of fuels for cooking should be improved

Via ELDIS

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Books

• Studies in the Economic History of Kenya: Land, Water, Railways, Education, and Entrepreneurship

• Challenges of Primary Education in Developing Countries: Insights from Kenya

• Does the Village Still Raise the Child?: A Collaborative Study of Changing Child-Rearing and Early Education in Kenya (Suny Series, Early Childhood Education)

• Kenya (Country Guide)