Local food price volatility and school dropout in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract

Worldwide, children are enrolled in primary school in greater numbers than everbefore. Nonetheless, school dropout rates are significant in many countries. A crucialfactor in a child’s education and potential for leaving school is their family’s economicinsecurity. Low-income households, in particular, are highly sensitive to food prices,and increases in the cost of food staples can force families to sacrifice education tosmooth food consumption. While earlier studies have relied on aggregate measuresof economic conditions or are restricted to single countries and limited time periods,we take an individual approach and examine how education is affected by local foodprice volatility. Empirically, we combine individual-level data on school dropout from40 Demographic and Health Surveys in 14 sub-Saharan African countries between1992 and 2020 with geo-referenced data on consumer food prices at local marketsfrom the World Food Programme. Our results show that children are up to 8 percentmore likely to drop out when local food prices sharply increase. Notably, this effectis strongest for older children, especially for boys. This demonstrates that economicinstability during childhood can have long-run adverse effects on individuals and hasimportant implications for understanding the human capital costs of income crises