When parents in Senegal decide upon primary school enrollment of their children, they might
consider future returns to education. These future benefits in turn heavily depend on a child’s
prospects to attend secondary school. If private returns to primary schooling are very low and
secondary schooling is costly but yields higher returns, the incentive to send children to primary
school might be low for poor families.
Based on a new household survey from urban and rural northern Senegal, this paper
reassesses the puzzling results of Filmer (2007) according to which the availability of secondary
schools does not affect primary school participation in Senegal. The empirical results confirm
that secondary school availability does not play a role for the average child. Distance to the next
secondary school matters only for the two highest wealth quintiles. Instead, the availability of
primary schools and household wealth are important determinants of primary school enrollment.
To shed further light on this surprising result, the paper discusses various reasons why the
distance to the nearest secondary school might not be a very good proxy of a child’s prospect of
secondary school attendance.