The Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality in Tanzania
Despite significant improvements in health care access and education in recent years, the sub-Saharan African region continues to experience high levels of poverty, particularly among youth, young adults, and rural residents. Within a decade, poverty will primarily be an African phenomenon. Both young and old populations on the African continent have migrated to other areas to seek education and escape conflict and environmental crises. While African economies have grown and the children today have better access to educational opportunities and healthcare than their parents, relatively little information exists on how recent investments in human capital formation affect transitions into adulthood and intergenerational mobility of income.
In a new study to be conducted by Faculty Associates Kenneth Leonard (PI) and Sangeetha Madhavan (Co-I), in collaboration with colleagues from Tanzania and the World Bank, the team will investigate the pathways through which study participants accumulate human capital, including education, job skills, and the ability to raise a family, all of which are critical for escaping the cycle of poverty. In addition to examining how human capital is accumulated, they will also study the ability of the participants to respond to a range of shocks, including the impacts of the HIV / AIDS crises, the challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, influxes of refugees, and the impacts of weather and climate.
To do so, they will build on a long-term panel of residents from the Kagera region of Tanzania (the Kagera Health and Development Survey) to create a 30-year panel of respondents and their children. The panel will track residents, including those who have migrated across Tanzania or internationally, taking advantage of the demonstrated success in tracking from a pilot study conducted in 2019-2020. Data on education, location, marriage, fertility and consumption will be included for the full sample on the panel. Additional focused modules on individual preferences, networks among family members, and intra-household allocation processes will also be included. Each module will be administered in one third of the sample with households randomly assigned to one of the phases. The team expects to find 2,700 of the original 3,000 children and will also collect data from the expected 8,500 children of these baseline children.
The analysis will focus on measuring the degree of intergenerational transmission of education and consumption (and therefore a measure of permanent income), comparing adults who will be around forty years old to their parents at the same ages in the first wave of the survey. This data will allow the team to examine education transmission in up to four generations, for both men and women, and the transmission of consumption inequality for two generations. Additionally, they will also examine the transition to adulthood of respondents in this sample, focusing on household formation and the role of migration in the transition from schooling to work.
The ultimate goal of this project is to measure the degree to which poverty (both absolute and relative) is transmitted across generations and to describe the process by which the respondents accumulate human capital and respond to shocks. The results from this study will be designed to assist scholars in identifying the gaps in support needed for young adults in sub-Saharan Africa to escape poverty.
Kenneth Leonard, PI; Sangeetha Madhavan, Co-I; "Transitions to adulthood and transmission of inequality as seen in a 30-year panel from Kagera, Tanzania", Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development R01, 04/01/2025 - 02/28/2030.
