Children in West Africa are often sent to other families to help them get ahead – but foster care can have the opposite effect

In West Africa, it is common for families to take care of their children informally. This helps ease the burden on parents and can give children from poorer families the chance to improve their lives.

An estimated 20 to 40% of mothers in the region have sent at least one child to another household for an extended period of time. This household acts as a “social parent.”

Education is one of the main reasons for this practice: children may live in households with more resources for schooling or near schools.

Whether this care is beneficial or harmful depends on how much the host families are willing to support and invest in the foster children.

The practice of child care differs from the formal care systems common in many parts of the world. Care arrangements in sub-Saharan Africa are typically informal and unregulated. Without legal or economic incentives, there is a risk that host households will not invest in the well-being of foster children, including their education, as much as in their own.

My research examined the relationship between caregiving and school attendance. I looked at how this has changed over time and whether it depends on how wealthy a care household is.

I found that in some West African countries, foster children are less likely to attend school than children who are not placed in foster care. And children who grew up in wealthier households were the least likely to attend school compared to their counterparts who did not grow up in foster care.

The findings highlight the need to establish or improve systems to monitor the performance of foster children. They also point out that more research is needed to understand caregiving in wealthier families.

Comparing changes 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 Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Togo.

The sample included 86,803 children ages 6 to 12 whose biological parents were still alive. The analysis compared the school enrollment of foster children with that of children who were not in foster care in the two time periods.

In the 2005/06 school year, 16.7% of the children examined were placed in foster families. In the 2017/18 school year, 19.4% were placed in foster care.

I expected that foster children would be less likely to go to school than children who were not in foster care. This is because the reasons parents send their children away may not exactly match the reasons host households agree to accept their children.

I also assumed that the difference in school attendance between foster and non-foster children would decrease over time as free primary education was introduced.

Instead, the results showed that foster children were significantly less likely to ever attend school in 2017-18 than in 2005-06. In the 2017/18 school year, foster children were 0.49 times more likely to have ever attended school than children who were not in care. In the 2005-06 school year, there was no difference between foster and non-foster children.

I also expected that wealthier households would be able to invest more in children – both foster children and their own.

However, this was not the case. Only in the poorest host households was the probability that foster children attended school in 2005/06 and 2017/18 higher than for children who did not live in foster families. In wealthier households, foster children faced greater disadvantages in attending school as the wealth of the household increased.

Worrying inequalities

The findings are worrying because they suggest that wealthier families are not necessarily taking in children to improve their well-being, but rather to use them for household chores. Some research suggests that households’ decisions to foster children depend on the demand for child labor. This could result in foster children not attending school regularly.

It is also possible that poor parents do not have the power to intervene when wealthier host households interfere with their children’s education.

The results suggest that the proportion of children who have ever attended school increased over the two periods. However, the finding that more than a tenth of children in the sample have never attended school in the recent period suggests challenges in implementing free education policies.

Challenges include:

• competing demands on children’s time in households where child labor is required

• the inability of households to pay for transport, books and uniforms.

The observed inequality in school attendance depending on care status, particularly among wealthier households, highlights the inequality in education. This has implications for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure equitable education. The African Union has declared 2024 the Year of Education, reinforcing the importance of ensuring that all children on the continent go to school.