Access to Education for Poor Children: A Case Study of Compassion International in the Agbogba Community, Ghana

Abstract

Education has been recognized as an important tool in reducing poverty, especially due to its intergenerational effects. Thus poverty reduction efforts have often targeted the educational sector with national governments leading the way. Government interventions have however been unable to adequately ensure educational access for all. As a result, Non-Governmental Organisations such as Compassion International (CI) have stepped in to provide complementary programmes to make education attainable to poor children. The research aims to analyse the role of personal characteristics (gender, parent’s education, family size, school type) and membership to the Compassion International (CI) intervention to explain the difference in educational attainment of students in Agbogba. In order to achieve this aim, data was collected on students’ performance and personal characteristics for 162 students between the ages of 15-19 in the Agbogba community. These constitute two groups of students: one group that are beneficiaries of the CI intervention and another that did not benefit from the intervention. Regression methods are applied to identify the roles of these factors for the two groups of students. Results show that parental education and being on the intervention are important determinants of school performance, with positive and negative association, respectively, with performance on the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). Further analysis showed however that lower BECE scores of beneficiaries of the intervention did not impede their educational progress, and that CI actually improved the participants’ progress holistically.