Attending school, two "Rs" and child work in rural Ethiopia

Rural Ethiopia has amongst the highest rates of child labour force activity in the world. Children start assuming household and farm responsibilities as early as four years of age and on average contribute 29-30 hours of labor per week.

This paper investigates whether the number of hours worked by children has an effect on school attendance and on their reading and writing ability (RWA). It does this through a three step analysis:

• providing an idea of the incidence and intensity of child labour in rural Ethiopia
• identifying the factors responsible for determining the allocation of child time to schooling and work
• examining the consequences of child labour on school attendance and RWA

To this end, the author conducts his analysis on a sample of 3,043 children between the age of 4 and 15. The data was gathered from the fifth round of the rural survey conducted during the 1999-2000 crop season in 18 peasant associations.

The author detects a non-linear relationship between hours of work and school attendance/RWA of children. Initially there is a positive link between working and schooling/RWA. However, at the range of 16-22 hours of weekly work the ability of a child to read and write begins to suffer while school attendance is not affected. Beyond this threshold RWA and school attendance suffer.

The author finds the following:

• high intensity of work effort is accompanied by strikingly low levels of school participation
• school quality and school price have a strong effect on schooling but have no impact on the allocation of time to work
• while the availability of agricultural machinery reduces the demand for child labour, other technologies such as the spread of improved seeds, at least in the short run, increase the burden of work