Parental Death and Children's Schooling in Two Sahelian Countries (Burkina Faso and Mali). What's Wrong with the Extended Family System?

Jean-François Kobiané, Université de Montréal
Richard Marcoux, Université de Laval

Sub-Saharan Africa is well known for the importance of its extended family system which allows support to vulnerable members, for instance orphans, in terms of education, health or others social issues. But in a context of declining living standards as it is the case in Burkina Faso and Mali, two poor sahelian countries experiencing the consequences of drastic economic policies like the Structural Adjustment Programs, one expects the family system to be unable to come up to all the expectations from the extended family members, in particular to afford for orphans’ needs. Using event history data sets from two 2000 national surveys that provided information concerning almost 8 644 and 8 453 individuals respectively in Burkina Faso and Mali, we examine the impact of the death of parents on children’s probability of entry to school and dropping out from school.