| Sumario: | The annual school and agricultural calendars exercise near-universal influence on life in the developing world, yet until recently there was little research on the interaction between the two. In the United States, it’s a widely held belief that the typical school calendar developed around the already existing farming calendar. While some debate this (Fischel (2006) argues it had more to do with summer migration), the economic intuition is sound: Schedule school when low farm labor demand decreases the opportunity cost of school, and break in the summer when high farm labor demand increases the opportunity cost of school. This arrangement should lead to higher school participation in farming communities where children are expected to help on the household farm.
However, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), school calendars did not evolve over time in response to local conditions but in many cases are leftover institutions from colonial times set up to match European school and administrative calendars. For example, many countries in West Africa start school in late September or early October, as did the French school calendar, though this is just before the harvest. Though those colonial regimes are mostly gone, SSA school calendars still do not change often: According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, of 45 SSA countries from 1997-2019 (over 900 country-years), there are only six instances of countries permanently shifting the start or end months of their school calendar by two months or more: Angola and Ghana both lengthened their calendars, and Malawi, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Tanzania shifted their calendars once. Therefore, given that children in SSA are often expected to contribute to household agricultural production, an important question is: How does overlap in the school and farming calendars affect children’s schooling outcomes?
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