Does Free Primary Education Narrow Gender Differences in Schooling? Evidence from Kenya

Developing countries have invested heavily in efforts to meet universal primary education targets. While Latin American countries have recently used targeted programs such as conditional cash transfers to boost primary school enrollments, African countries have mostly employed universal approaches such as free primary education programs. Although these programs have enabled countries to make significant progress toward their primary education targets, they have been less successful in eliminating gender gaps in education. The World Bank estimates that the number of out of school children declined from 100 million to 75 million between 1999 and 2006. Despite this progress, data from the World Bank show that girls still accounted for approximately 55 percent of the out of school children in 2006. 1 As a result, the Millennium Development Goal target of gender equality in primary school by 2005 was not achieved and there is uncertainty surrounding the possibility of achieving this target by 2015. There is a large body of evidence that highlights the importance of female education for development and growth. Overall these studies find positive relationships between increases in female education and GDP per capita, the number of women in the formal labor market, labor productivity, infant and child survival, and the education of subsequent generations (see Herz and Sperling 2004 for a summary of this literature). Despite the empirical evidence supporting the benefits of increasing female education and the recent spread of free primary education programs, there is little rigorous empirical analysis on the efficacy of these policies on