ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates whether the costs of African schooling made expansion unaffordable, whether governments or households were unable to allocate the necessary resources to primary schooling, or whether they became, in some sense, unwilling to do so. It suggests that the variation of public spending on primary schooling provides some indication of the extent of public commitment to its provision. In every major developing region, the rate of growth of school and college enrolments slowed, as compared with the previous two decades. Past causal processes may well conspire again to prevent the attainment of enrolment targets for boys and girls. The enrolment capacity of school systems is strongly influenced by the amount of money governments and households are prepared to spend upon them. The chapter concludes that gender discrimination in school enrolments is greatest where overall enrolments are low, but that it may not completely disappear even as gross enrolment ratios approach 100.
