Orphanhood and Schooling in South Africa: Trends in the vulnerability of orphans between 1993 and 2005

Using 11 nationally representative surveys conducted between 1993 and 2005 this paper assesses the extent to which the vulnerability of orphans to poorer educational outcomes has changed over time as the AIDS crisis deepens in South Africa. This paper seeks to establish whether the fear that extended families are no longer effective safety nets may be overstated or whether traditional coping strategies are indeed breaking down. Patterns of care giving for orphans do appear to be shifting over time but these changes are taking place within the extended family safety net. Orphans are still absorbed into extended families but single orphans are increasingly less likely to live with the surviving parent and there is an increasing reliance on grandparents as caregivers. At every point in time cross-sectional evidence suggests that orphans are at risk of poorer educational outcomes with maternal deaths generally having stronger negative effects than paternal deaths. Paternal deaths are strongly associated with poorer socio-economic status and much of the deficit experienced by children who have lost a father is explained by the relative poverty of their current household. In contrast maternal deaths appear to be directly associated with poorer schooling outcomes rather than channelled through socio-economic status. The results in this paper suggest that parental involvement and relatedness to the household are among the multiple pathways through which parental death affects a child’s schooling. Despite a significant increase in the number of orphans over the last decade this paper finds no evidence of a systematic deterioration in traditional coping strategies with respect to orphan’s educational outcomes.

The impact of parental death on school enrollment and achievement: Longitudinal evidence from South Africa

We analyse longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance area (DSA) in KwaZulu-Natal, to examine the impact of parental death on children's outcomes. We find significant differences in the impact of mothers' and fathers' deaths. The loss of a child's mother is a strong predictor of poor schooling outcomes. Maternal orphans are significantly less likely to be enrolled in school, and have completed significantly fewer years of schooling, conditional on age, than children whose mothers are alive. Less money is spent on their educations on average, conditional on enrolment. Moreover, children whose mothers have died appear to be at an educational disadvantage when compared to non-orphaned children with whom they live. We use the timing of mothers' deaths relative to children's educational shortfalls to argue that mothers' deaths have a causal effect on children's educations. The loss of a child's father is a significant predictor of household socioeconomic status. Children whose fathers have died live in significantly poorer households, measured on a number of dimensions. However, households in which fathers died were poor prior to fathers' deaths. The death of a father between waves of the survey has no significant effect on subsequent household economic status. While the loss of a father is correlated with poorer educational outcomes, this correlation arises because a father's death is a marker that the household is poor. Evidence from the South African 2001 Census suggests that the estimated effects of maternal deaths on children's school attendance and attainment in the Africa Centre DSA reflect the reality for orphans throughout South Africa.

Parental Loss and Schooling: Evidence from Metropolitan Cape Town

This paper makes use of the Cape Area Panel study (CAPS), a longitudinal study of youth and their families in metropolitan Cape Town in order to broaden the empirical body of evidence of the causal impact of parental death on children’s schooling in South Africa in two dimensions. First, analysis of CAPS allows us to examine the extent to which results may generalize across geographically and socioeconomically distinct areas. Second, CAPS allows for an explicit exploration of whether the causal impact lessens as time since the parental death lengthens. Evidence from the CAPS is consistent with that from a large demographic surveillance site in rural KwaZulu-Natal in supporting the findings that mother’s deaths have a causal impact on children’s schooling outcomes and that there is no evidence of a causal effect of paternal loss on schooling for African children. The loss of a father has a significant negative impact on the education of coloured children but a significant amount of this impact is driven by socioeconomic status. We exploit the longitudinal data to investigate the extent to which orphan disadvantage precedes parental death and whether orphans begin to recover in the period following a parent’s death or whether they continue to fall behind. We find no evidence of orphan recovery in the period following their parent’s death and results suggest that negative impacts increase with the time since the parent died. The longer-run impact of parental death in childhood is also evident in an analysis of the completion of secondary schooling by early adulthood. These results suggest that parental death will reduce the ultimate human capital attainment of the child.

Financial Services and the Informal Economy

This paper examines the impact of formality of employment on the utilisation of financial services, using data from the October 2000 Income and Expenditure Survey and the September 2000 Labour Force Survey. The presence of an employed member in the household is seen to be important for the utilisation of both bank accounts and funeral insurance, even after controlling for income. Furthermore there are strong links between the nature of this employment and utilisation of financial services. Employees are more likely to utilise financial services than the self-employed. Among employees, the probability of utilising financial services increases with the degree of formality of employment. These effects are stronger for formal banking services than for funeral insurance which includes informal burial societies.

Early childbearing, human capital attainment and mortality risk

This paper uses a rich longitudinal dataset to examine the relationship between teen fertility and both subsequent educational outcomes and mortality risk in rural South Africa. Human capital deficits among teen mothers are large and significant, with earlier births associated with greater deficits. In contrast to many other studies, we find no clear evidence of selectivity into teen childbearing in either schooling trajectories or pre-fertility household characteristics. Enrolment rates among teen mothers only begin to drop in the period immediately preceding the birth and future teen mothers are not behind in their schooling relative to other girls. Older teen mothers and those further ahead in school for their age pre-birth are more likely to continue schooling after the birth. Following women over a six year period we document a higher mortality risk before the age of 30 for teen mothers that cannot be explained by household characteristics in early adulthood.

Orphanhood and Schooling in South Africa: Trends in the vulnerability of orphans between 1993 and 2005

Using 11 nationally representative surveys conducted between 1993 and 2005 this paper assesses the extent to which the vulnerability of orphans to poorer educational outcomes has changed over time as the AIDS crisis deepens in South Africa. This paper seeks to establish whether the fear that extended families are no longer effective safety nets may be overstated or whether traditional coping strategies are indeed breaking down. Patterns of care giving for orphans do appear to be shifting over time but these changes are taking place within the extended family safety net. Orphans are still absorbed into extended families but single orphans are increasingly less likely to live with the surviving parent and there is an increasing reliance on grandparents as caregivers. At every point in time cross-sectional evidence suggests that orphans are at risk of poorer educational outcomes with maternal deaths generally having stronger negative effects than paternal deaths. Paternal deaths are strongly associated with poorer socio-economic status and much of the deficit experienced by children who have lost a father is explained by the relative poverty of their current household. In contrast maternal deaths appear to be directly associated with poorer schooling outcomes rather than channelled through socio-economic status. The results in this paper suggest that parental involvement and relatedness to the household are among the multiple pathways through which parental death affects a child's schooling. Despite a significant increase in the number of orphans over the last decade this paper finds no evidence of a systematic deterioration in traditional coping strategies with respect to orphan's educational outcomes.

Labor supply responses to large social transfers: Longitudinal evidence from South Africa

In many parts of the developing world, rural areas exhibit high rates of unemployment and underemployment. Understanding what prevents people living in rural areas from migrating to find better jobs is central to the development process. This issue is especially salient in South Africa, where differences in earnings and employment rates between rural and urban areas are large and persistent (Chamberlain and van der Berg 2002; Leite et al. 2006; Banerjee et al. 2007). In this paper, we examine whether binding credit constraints and childcare constraints limit the ability of households to send labor migrants, and whether the arrival of a large, stable source of income-here, the South African old-age pension-helps households to overcome these constraints.

Schooling as a Lottery: Racial Differences in School Advancement in Urban South Africa

This paper develops a stochastic model of grade repetition to analyze the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. The model predicts that a larger stochastic component in the link between learning and measured performance will generate higher enrollment, higher failure rates, and a weaker link between ability and grade progression. Using recently collected longitudinal data we find that progress through secondary school is strongly associated with scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy test. In grades 8-11 the effect of these scores on grade progression is much stronger for white and coloured students than for African students, while there is no racial difference in the impact of the scores on passing the nationally standardized grade 12 matriculation exam. The results provide strong support for our model, suggesting that grade progression in African schools is poorly linked to actual ability and learning. The results point to the importance of considering the stochastic component of grade repetition in analyzing school systems with high failure rates.

Employment status, security and the management of risk: A study of workers in Kwamsane, Kwazulu-Natal

The study investigates the concept of security in relationship to work and employment. Work has conventionally been seen as the pathway to economic security; however, the growth in the numbers of people in the informal economy and in atypical forms of formal work has led to work being a source of risk and vulnerability for some categories of workers. We propose that security has separate components: income, health, education, employment and skill reproduction, place of work, demand, capital, and the ability to manage risk. We use eighteen indicators for the wage employed and six for the self-employed to estimate the extent of formality of employment, and use these to assess the components of work-related security for those in different employment statuses. This framework was applied to data collected in Kwamsane, KwaZulu-Natal in 2003. As expected, the self-employed were generally more vulnerable than those in wage employment, and there was clear gender segmentation in the labour market. However, differentiating the wage employed into three clusters based on the degree of formality of their employment revealed a more complex and nuanced picture

Health Seeking Behavior in Northern KwaZulu-Natal

We examine patterns of health seeking behaviour prior to death among 1282 individuals who lived in the Umkhanyakude District of Northern KwaZulu-Natal. Information on the health care choices of these individuals, who died between January 2003 and July 2004, was gathered after their deaths from their primary care-givers. We examine choices made concerning public and private medicine, western and traditional medicine, and non-prescribed self-medication. We find that virtually all adults who were ill prior to death sought treatment from a Western medical provider, visiting either a public clinic or a private doctor. In this district, which is predominantly poor, ninety percent of adults who sought treatment from a public clinic also visited a private doctor. Fifty percent also sought treatment from a traditional healer, suggesting that traditional medicine is seen as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, Western care. Better educated people who were ill for less than a month before dying were significantly more likely to visit a private doctor, while those least well educated were more likely to visit a traditional healer. Controlling for length of illness, better educated and wealthier people sought care from a greater range of providers, and spent significantly more on their treatment.