Children Who Have Never Gone to School: How Regional Heterogeneity Shapes Access to Primary Education in Uganda
Keywords:
Education, School enrollment, Spatial inequalities, Poverty, Gender, Multilevel model, Sub-Saharan Africa, UgandaAbstract
Despite Uganda being among the first sub-Saharan countries to introduce universal primary education in 1997, approximately 6% of children aged 9–11 had never attended school as of 2014. A thorough examination of a 10% sample from the latest Uganda Population and Housing Census (2014) dataset underscores notable spatial disparities. We compared the outcomes of separate logistic regression analyses conducted for the Karamoja subregion, the remaining parts of the country, and the entire country. Our multilevel analyses reveal that the influence of household heads’ education and wealth on school enrollment emerges as a consistent factor. However, while girls in Karamoja and boys in the rest of Uganda were significantly more likely to have never been enrolled in school, gender was not a significant factor in the national model. Gender-specific expectations and limitations vary, which must be taken into account by policymakers. Our analysis challenges the relevance of national models, and consequently, many national-level findings, in a setting characterized by significant subnational diversity.
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