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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Developing Lower secondary education: a rural issue and challenge for sub-saharan Africa

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description

The ongoing progresses of coverage of primary education in Sub-Saharan African Countries are inevitably to impact lower secondary education in a significant manner. Beyond the need for all countries to identify a global policy to deal with the problem, it is important to understand that expansion of coverage of lower secondary education will concern rural populations since coverage is generally already relatively high in cities while it is lagging noticeably in rural settings; many schools will need to be built and operate in a near future. A basic characteristic of rural schools is that most of them enroll only a limited number of students and, in current circumstances tend to cost significantly more than their urban counterpart (pattern of economies of scale in the production of education services). In this context, the research provides information for a large sample of SSA countries both in terms of current coverage of lower secondary education in urban and rural settings and the magnitude of the rural dimension of its expansion in the future. Then the pattern of economies of scale is documented for most of them, helping to identify its global magnitude as well as its large variation across countries. This helps to identify first the countries that prove to be performing on that count and second some principles that could be use to help facilitate the expansion of coverage in an efficient manner in a context where, quantity, equity and quality considerations are together to be taken into consideration