Overage adolescent girls and schooling exit in sub Saharan Africa

Overage adolescent girls and school exit in sub Saharan Africa

Ben Sylla, Research Associate, Education Policy and Data Center 

Rachel Hatch, Research Associate, Education Policy and Data Center  

As discussed elsewhere, early marriage is often associated with lower levels of education. A forthcoming EPDC paper explores the relationship between early marriage and education, looking at the extent to which marriage predicts school participation. As part of the analysis, EPDC looks at the relationship between a student’s age relative to the official age for their grade and their relative likelihood of school participation. Figure A reports some of the findings, looking at young women between the ages of 13 and 17 in Malawi - regardless of marital status - and considering the percentage of young women who attended school one year but then did NOT attend the following year, a shift that we call school exit. Figure A shows these patterns of school exit by the number of years overage a young woman is for her grade. 

Figure A. Rate of school exit, by number of years over-age, for women between the ages of 13 and 17 in Malawi

Figure A shows that, independent of their actual age, young women who are one or more years older than the official expected age for their grade are at greater risk of leaving school than children who are at or below the expected age for their grade (the small proportion of students below the official age for their grade are included in the "None" category). In settings where late entry into school and multiple grade repetitions are a common component of many children’s educational careers, it is not uncommon for pupils to be several years older than the expected age for their class: In Malawi 81% of women ages 13-17 attending primary or secondary school were older than the expected age for their grade and 59% were three or more years older than the expected age for their grade.