most villagers in rural Burkina Faso would consider them adults. They are physically mature, have
passed initiation rites, and females are of an acceptable age for marriage. In addition, for older
children, it becomes difficult to disentangle what is child fostering and what is an example of a
household splitting off members to form distinct and separate households.
The success of the tracking phase makes these data particularly unique and appropriate for
measuring the impact of fostering on school enrollment. Approximately sixty percent of the paired
households were located within a twenty-five mile radius of the child’s home, twenty-five percent
were located in the capital fifty miles away, six percent were scattered across the other provinces
of Burkina Faso about one hundred and fifty miles away, and nine percent were in Côte d’Ivoire
approximately eight hundred miles away. There were 316 paired households to be found during the
tracking phase, and the field research team located 94.9 percent of them, 300 households in total.8
2.2 Data
In addition to the 316 foster children, in the sending households, there were 994 biological siblings
who have never been fostered, and in the receiving households, there were 640 host siblings who had
never been fostered. Analyzing the school enrollment rates for these different groups of children in
Table 1 shows that foster children and the biological siblings they left behind have similar average
enrollment rates (17.6 percent for foster children and 19.5 percent for biological siblings). However,
children in the host households have a much higher average enrollment rate of 31.1 percent. Average
age is similar across the three groups of children ranging from 9.7 to 10.4 years old, but foster
8The sixteen tracked households that were not interviewed included four households (three in the capital and one
in Côte d’Ivoire) that were found but refused to be surveyed, four households in the capital in which the child left
the village in search of work and had not yet contacted his biological parents to indicate the family with whom he
was now living, two households where the parents left children in the village in Burkina Faso and went to work in
Côte d’Ivoire but the receiving household did not have information to locate them, and three households (two in
Côte d’Ivoire and one in Togo) that had contacted the parents to inform them they were moving towns and would
send more contact information once they were settled. Finally, the remaining three cases included issues of disputed
paternity, alleged adultery, and confirmed sorcery.