In west Africa, it’s common for families to foster children informally. This helps ease the burden on parents and can give children from poorer families a chance to improve their lives.
An estimated 20% to 40% of mothers in the region have sent at least one child to live with another household for an extended period. That household acts as a “social parent”.
Education is one of the leading reasons for the practice: children can be in households with more resources for schooling or closer to schools.
Whether this fostering is beneficial or harmful depends on how much the host families are willing to support and invest in the fostered children.
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The practice of child fostering differs from the formal foster care systems that are common in many parts of the world. Fostering arrangements in sub-Saharan Africa are typically informal and
unregulated. Without legal or economic incentives, there’s a risk that host households may not be as invested in the welfare of fostered children, including their education, as they are in their own.
My research studied the relationship between fostering and school attendance. I looked at how this has changed over time and whether it is affected by how wealthy a fostering household is.
I found that in some west African countries, fostered children were less likely to attend school than children who were not fostered. And children fostered by wealthier households were the least likely to attend school compared to their non-fostered counterparts.
The findings highlight the need to set up or improve systems to monitor how fostered children are doing. They also suggest more research is needed to understand fostering in wealthier families.
Comparing change over time
The research used data from five countries that conducted similar surveys about a decade apart, in 2005/06 and 2017/18. The countries were The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Togo.
The sample comprised 86,803 children aged 6 to 12 whose biological parents were alive. The analysis compared school enrolment of fostered children with children who were not fostered over the two periods.
In 2005/06, 16.7% of the children in the sample were fostered. In 2017/18, 19.4% were fostered.
I expected to find that fostered children would be less likely to attend school than children who were not fostered. This is because it is possible that the purposes for which parents send their children away may not align exactly with the reasons the host households agree to have them.
I also expected that the difference in school attendance between fostered and non-fostered children would decrease over time, because free primary education policies were being introduced.
But instead, the findings showed that in 2017/18, children who were fostered were much less likely to have ever attended school than was the case in 2005/06. In 2017/18, fostered children were 0.49 times as likely to have ever attended school compared to children who were not fostered. In 2005/06, there was no difference between fostered and non-fostered children.
I also expected that wealthier households would be able to invest more in children – both fostered and their own.
However, this was not the case. It was only in the poorest hosting households that foster children were more likely to attend school in 2005/06 and in 2017/18 compared to children who were not fostered. In wealthier households, foster children faced greater disadvantages in school attendance as the household’s wealth increased.
Worrying inequalities
The findings are worrying because they suggest that wealthier families might take in children not necessarily to improve their welfare, but to use them for household chores. There is some research suggesting that households’ decisions to foster in children are driven by demand for child labour. This could prevent foster children from attending school regularly.
It is also possible that poor parents might not have the power to step in if the wealthier hosting households are disrupting their children’s education.
The results indicate that there has been an increase in the proportion of children who have ever attended school over the two periods. However, the finding that more than one-tenth of children in the sample have never attended school in the most recent period is suggestive of challenges in the implementation of free education policies.
The challenges include: competing demands for children’s time in households where child labour is required
the inability of households to pay for transport, books and uniforms.
The observed disparity in school attendance by foster status, particularly for richer households, highlights inequality in education. This has implications for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4, which targets equitable education. The African Union declared 2024 the Year of Education, further highlighting the importance of ensuring all children on the continent attend school.
