USING GENERALIZED ESTIMATING EQUATIONS TO ASSESS THE EFFECT OF THE SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMME AND THE CAPITATION GRANT ON BASIC SCHOOL ENROLMENT. A CASE STUDY OF THE WENCHI MUNICIPALITY

ABSTRACT

Education has been defined as the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the process of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life. It is an unarguable fact across the globe that a nation’s development rests on the education of its citizens. But for a country to achieve a high literacy rate, basic education, which is regarded as the foundation should be held in high esteem. For this reason, governments in the pre and post-colonial era made significant strides all in an attempt to universalize primary education. These attempts brought in its wake a lot of educational and social interventions, policies and initiatives. In recent times in Ghana, two of such interventions believed to address the problem of universalizing primary education are the school feeding programme and the capitation grant, introduced in 2005 and 2004 respectively. In view of this, the study sought to assess the marginal effect of these two interventions on basic school enrolment using the Wenchi municipality as a case study. All eighty-one (81) primary schools (both public and private) in the municipality were used for the study. Enrolment figures of schools together with their feeding and capitation grant status, covering the period 2008 to 2015 were obtained at the Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) department of education directorate. Other variables obtained in addition were; the number of trained/untrained teachers, number of classrooms in good condition, number of textbooks per child, location of school and availability of portable water and toilet facilities. The data obtained was organized using MS-Excel and subsequently analyzed using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) family of models. The analysis was done using R and SPSS. The findings from the analyses revealed that the feeding programme and the capitation grant contribute significantly in increasing enrolment. However, other identifiable factors which were found to affect enrolment were number of trained teachers and availability of toilet facilities.