Following the widespread adoption and implementation of Education for All (EFA) at the World Education Forum held at Dakar as part of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, school enrolment at the basic level of education has increased in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the region having the lowest rate of youth enrolled in upper secondary schools in the world, countries are paying considerable attention to upper secondary education, which is argued to be a significant component of human capital formation and for meeting Sustainable Development Goal 4. However, unlike for basic level education, academic research on the factors that determine upper secondary school enrolment in the region is limited. Against this backdrop, the study investigates the effects of cost elimination on upper secondary school enrolment in Sub-Saharan Africa using macro-level panel data analysis of countries from 2003 to 2018. The results show that cost elimination, as a demand-side intervention, has a significant positive effect on upper secondary school enrolment. However, amid a high level of poverty rate, the magnitude of the positive effects of cost elimination tends to reduce. This shows that along with demand-side interventions that reduce direct costs to schooling, policies must focus on reducing the level of poverty for cost elimination to become effective in increasing school enrolment.

Although researchers have investigated the association between education and crime, few studies have studied Sub-Saharan Africa, which has the lowest rate of youth enrolled in high school. Notwithstanding, some countries are paying attention to high school education, whereby specific policies often termed “cost elimination” are designed to facilitate free education. At the micro-to-micro level, it is argued that enrolling and completing high school reduces the rate of criminal engagement. Against this backdrop, we investigate the effect of high school enrolment on the crime rate using macro-to-macro-level panel data about Sub-Saharan Africa countries from 2003 to 2018. Using theft and homicide rates as proxies for property and violent crime, respectively, our results show that an increase in enrolment has a significant negative effect on property crime. We find no evidence of a significant effect on violent crime. When addressing endogeneity bias using cost elimination as an instrument for enrolment, we find that the magnitude of the negative effect on the rate of theft is significantly greater and robust than the baseline estimates. These findings support the assumption that interventions that support access to education improve social structures and have the additional benefit of reducing the rate of theft, giving credence to social support theory. In a region where a majority of theft is committed by youth without a high school education, policymakers need to make concerted efforts to raise participation in high school as one of the means of reducing crime, rather than focusing exclusively on crime control.

The underlying ambition of fee-free education is to increase school access. This study reflects on decentralisation in the decision-making process and implementation of fee-free policies. We compare two policies at the high school level in Ghana to evaluate the differences and commonalities in how they responded to school access. We used interviews and secondary sources of data for qualitative content analysis. Haddad and Demsky’s rationality framework of education policymaking served as the analytical guide. The results show that Free Senior High School policy (FSHS) increased access to education by responding to the existing problem of low rate of transition from lower secondary to upper secondary education, unlike Progressive Free Senior High School policy (PFSHS). However, the desirability of access is over-prioritised in the current FSHS – unlike in the PFSHS, leaving gaps in administration, educational facilities and resources: challenges attributable to the concentration of centralised administrative decisions during policy formulation and implementation. We propose remedial measures to address these challenges.

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are expanding access to high school education, which is a perpetuation of the previous focus on basic education. This study applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using data from seven countries from 2010 to 2020 to examine the potential conditions of fee-free policies at the high school level. Five potential conditions are analyzed. They include the regime type, electoral competition, ideological lineage, economic conditions, and social context. The findings indicate the significant influence of electoral competition and a high level of lower secondary school enrolment for the adoption of fee-free policies. The absence of electoral competition leads to a lack of fee-free policy. The paper explains how elections, one indicator of representative democracy, motivate political leaders to initiate social policies. Additionally, the study challenges the relevance of two important explanations for expansionary social policy in the literature—the partisan theory of policy outcomes, and the economy.

The study compares two fee-free policies at the upper secondary level in Ghana on how they responded to access and the policymaking processes in education. Secondary sources of data were used, while Haddad and Demsky’s framework of education policymaking served as the theoretical basis for textual data analysis. The results show that Free Senior High School policy responded to the program output of an increase in access, unlike Progressive Free Senior High policy. However, the inconsistent release of funding and limited stakeholder consultation are common features of the policies. It is further observed that the desirability of access is over prioritised in the current Free Senior High School policy, leaving gaps in educational facilities and resources during policy decision. To address these challenges, sources of funding must be re-assessed for possible policy redesign that invites consumers of the policy who opt for boarding status to absorb a proportion of boarding fees.