Parental Absence and Child Educational Outcomes in Rural South Africa: Do State Educational Policies Matter?

Literature shows that effect parental absence due to migration and death on child educational outcomes is mixed. Children whose parents are dead or absent for a long time have been found to perform poorly in school (Wright, 2010), while temporary migration seems to have adverse effect on aspiration for higher levels of education among children (Kandel and Kao, 2001). But evidence from Guatemala shows that remittance from migration enables households to spend more on education and reap better returns than non-remittance-receiving households (Adam, 2005), while paternal migration in early life of a daughter increases her educational attainment by a year in Mexico (Antman, 2012). These mixed results could be attributed to contextual factors such as state educational policies that mediate the effects of parental migration on child educational outcomes. I would like to argue that contextual factor such as state policy of free education can neutralise the effect of parental migration on child educational outcomes. Using discrete-time logit event history model on longitudinal data from Agincourt Health and Population Unit, South Africa, preliminary results show that state educational policy such as free education seems to neutralise the effect of parental labour migration on child educational outcomes among rural populations.