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Enhancing ICT for quality education in sub-Saharan Africa

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Abstract

This research assesses the relevance of information and communication technology (ICT) in primary education quality in a panel of 49 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2000–2012. The empirical evidence is based on Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) and Instrumental Quantile regressions (IQR). From the 2SLS: (i) mobile phone and internet penetration rates reduce poor quality education and enhancing internet penetration has a net negative effect of greater magnitude. From the IQR: (i) with the exception of the highest quantile for mobile phone penetration and top quantiles for internet penetration, ICT consistently has a negative effect on poor education quality with a non-monotonic pattern. (ii) Net negative effects are exclusively apparent in the median and top quantiles of internet-related regressions. It follows that enhancing internet penetration will benefit countries with above-median levels of poor education quality while enhancing internet penetration is not immediately relevant to reducing poor education quality in countries with below-median levels of poor education quality.

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Notes

  1. In the light of Fosu (2013), policy syndromes are characteristics that are detrimental to economic development, inter alia: “administered redistribution”, “state breakdown”, “state controls”, and “suboptimal inter temporal resource allocation”. According to Asongu (2017), a policy syndrome is a gap in knowledge economy between two countries whereas Asongu and Nwachukwu (2017) conceive and define it as economic growth that is not pro-poor. Tchamyou et al. (2019) and Tchamyou (2019a) consider it as inequality. Within the context of this study, policy syndrome is poor educational quality.

  2. There are four main World Bank income groups: (i) high income, $12,276 or more; (ii) upper middle income, $3976–$12,275; (iii) lower middle income, $1006–$3975 and (iv) low income, $1005 or less.

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The authors are indebted to the editor and reviewers for constructive comments.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Definitions and sources of variables
Table 4 Summary statistics
Table 5 Correlation Matrix (Uniform sample size: 347)

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Asongu, S.A., Odhiambo, N.M. Enhancing ICT for quality education in sub-Saharan Africa. Educ Inf Technol 24, 2823–2839 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09880-9

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