In West Africa, it is common for families to raise children informally. This can reduce the burden on parents and give children from poor families a chance to improve their lives.
An estimated 20 to 40 percent of mothers in the region have at least one child living with another household for an extended period of time. The household functions as a “social parent.”
One of the main reasons for this practice is education. Children may live in households with more resources for schooling or closer to schools.
Whether this adoption is beneficial or harmful depends on how much host families are willing to support and invest in the adopted children.
Child care practices differ from the formal foster care system that is common in many parts of the world. Foster care arrangements in sub-Saharan Africa are typically informal and unregulated. Without legal or financial incentives, host families risk being less invested in their foster children’s welfare, including education, than their own families.
In my research, I investigated the relationship between child rearing and school attendance. We looked at how this changed over time and whether it was influenced by how wealthy the foster family was.
In some West African countries, children in foster care were found to be less likely to attend school than non-foster children. And children who were cared for by wealthy families were the least likely to attend school compared to children who were not cared for.
The findings highlight the need to create or improve systems to monitor adopted children. They also suggest that more research is needed to understand adoption in wealthy families.
Compare changes over time
The study used data from five countries that conducted similar surveys in 2005/06 and 2017/18, approximately 10 years apart. Target countries are Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
The sample included 86,803 children aged 6 to 12 years with both living biological parents. The analysis compared the school attendance of children who were raised by foster parents and children who were not raised by foster parents over two time periods.
In 2005/06, 16.7% of the children in the sample were placed in foster care. In 2017/18, 19.4% became foster parents.
I expected to find that children who were raised in foster care were less likely to attend school than children who were not raised in foster care. This is because the reasons parents send their children for may not be exactly the same as the reasons why the receiving family agreed to send their children.
We also expected that the gap in enrollment rates between foster and non-foster parents would narrow over time because of the introduction of a free primary education policy.
But instead, the findings showed that in 2017/18, fostered children were far less likely to have attended school than in 2005/06. In 2017/18, foster cared children were 0.49 times more likely to have ever attended school than non-foster carers. In 2005/06, there were no differences between foster and non-foster children.
We also expected that wealthier families would be able to invest more in both adopted children and their own children.
But that wasn’t the case. In 2005/06 and 2017/18, foster children were more likely to attend school than non-adopted children only in the poorest host families. In wealthy families, foster children faced greater disadvantages in attending school as family wealth increased.
alarming inequality
This finding is concerning because it suggests that wealthy families may adopt children for use in household chores, rather than necessarily to improve their welfare. Some research suggests that the demand for child labor influences a family’s decision to raise a child. This can prevent foster children from attending school regularly.
Poor parents may also be powerless to intervene if wealthy host families are interfering with their children’s education.
The results show an increase in the proportion of children who have ever attended school over the two periods. However, the finding that more than a tenth of the children in the sample had not attended school at all in the most recent period suggests challenges in implementing the free education policy.
Challenges include:
Families that require child labor have competing demands on children’s time.
Households are unable to pay for transportation, books, and uniforms.
The disparity in school attendance based on foster parent status, especially among wealthy families, highlights inequalities in education. This has implications for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4, which targets equitable education. The African Union has declared 2024 the Year of Education, further emphasizing the importance of ensuring that all children on the continent have access to school.
