Land certification and schooling in rural Ethiopia

Africa

Ethiopia

Social Protection

Land entitlement

HC Fors, K Houngbedji, A Lindskog

2019

Congdon Fors, Heather, Kenneth Houngbedji, and Annika Lindskog. “Land Certification and Schooling in Rural Ethiopia.” World Development 115 (2019): 190–208.
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Data available upon request – link at the journal’s website.

2019

N. A.

From 2000 to 2007 (range of data).

Investigate the impact of a rural land certification program on schooling in Ethiopia.

Inheritors to land in Ethiopia law should be family, regional residents, and willing to engage in agriculture. The study uses information collected on children ages 6 to 24 years old (fourth round of survey).

The land certification program in Amhara is a broad program to register all land in the region. Due to capacity limitations, the program was gradually rolled out, creating an exogenous variation in the timing of the arrival of the program to the kebele (village). Within each kebele, meetings and awareness campaigns were held and farmers were informed about land demarcation and the advantages of holding a land certificate. A land administration committee (LAC) was elected, and farmers were then invited to apply for their holdings to be demarcated. Land administration committees are composed of five to seven members elected by residents of the kebele. They are responsible for all the practical matters of land administration and use at the kebele level. At least two members of the committees should be women, and the members work on a volunteer basis. Once a land user applied for a certificate over a piece of land and this claim had been verified by the LAC in the kebele, a temporary certificate was issued. The parcels with temporary certificates were publicly debated for one month to verify that the neighbors would not claim the land registered. In case of agreement and after corrections when necessary, a primary certificate was issued (also called a green book) for each household registered.

• Granting of land certificate and school enrollment.
• Granting of land certificate and grade progress.

Difference-in-Differences

Study design: the authors use a panel data from 14 kebeles (villages) in two zones (East Gojjam and South Wollo) and use the variation in the timing of the arrival of the program to identify the effects of the program on school enrollment, grade progress, and child labor. They use a difference-in-difference strategy where household fixed effects control for time-constant differences between the kebeles. To estimate a causal effect with a difference-in-difference strategy the parallel trends assumptions must be fulfilled. In their case, this means that the expansion of the land certification program must not be correlated with differences in underlying trends in child outcomes across kebeles. The authors find that schooling outcomes and child labor displayed similar dynamics across early and late treated kebeles before the onset of the land certification program. To the extent that past trends provide insight into future trends, these results suggest that time-varying unobserved differences are unlikely to drive any differences observed across early and late treated kebeles following the land certification program.
Sample: the original sample included twelve randomly chosen kebeles, six from East Gojjam and six from South Wollo, with two more kebeles added in the third round (one from East Gojjam and one from South Wollo). Within each kebele, 120 households were randomly selected. The data comes from the Ethiopian Environmental Household Survey (EEHS), collected by the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) in cooperation with the University of Gothenburg

and, during the last round, the World Bank. Four rounds of data have been collected to date, in 2000, 2002, 2005, and 2007. Interviews were conducted from April through June and coincide with the end of the Ethiopian school year, which starts in September and ends in June of the following year.
Survey Instrument: on average an interview took 1.6 days to complete. When a household was not located in a follow-up survey it was replaced with another, randomly selected, household. Household attrition was, however, low: 94.9% of the households in the first round were still in the sample in the fourth round. Information was collected about all household members, whether currently residing in the household or not. In the analysis, the authors use the information on whether a boy is the oldest son or not since oldest sons seem to be the main inheritors of the land. A boy is classified as the oldest son if he is the oldest son for whom data was collected, i.e., if he is the oldest son considered by the respondent to

belong to the household. Since there might be older sons who are not considered part of the household anymore, our oldest son variable is likely to contain measurement error.

The results show a positive effect of improved land rights on school enrollment for all children in one of the zones studied, and for oldest sons in the other. Conditional on school enrollment, the main effect of land certification on grade progress is not statistically significant. However, the arrival of land certification seems to have worsened the grade progress of the oldest sons compared to other boys.

Child Labour

Households

Local

As a result of the land certification program, total child labour at the household level may increase or decrease depending on the characteristics of the targeted region in Ethiopia.

The results show a positive effect of improved land rights on school enrollment for all children in one of the zones studied, and for oldest sons in the other. Conditional on school enrollment, the main effect of land certification on grade progress is not statistically significant. However, the arrival of land certification seems to have worsened the grade progress of the oldest sons compared to other boys.

A survey conducted during the process of land certification shows that there is a belief that the program should reduce conflicts, make it easier for children to inherit the land, and increase the likelihood of compensation if the land is taken away.