Transitions to adulthood and transmission of inequality as seen in a 30-year panel from Kagera, Tanzania - Project Summary The African population is young, and those young people are often poor. Within a decade, poverty will primarily be an African phenomenon. Both young and old on the continent have engaged in migration to seek education and to escape conflict and environmental crises. There are notable recent improvements: African children today have better access to education and healthcare than their parents and African economies have grown faster. However, we know relatively little about how recent investments in human capital formation affect the transition to adulthood and intergenerational mobility of income. In this project we will build on a long-term panel of residents from the Kagera region of Tanzania (the KHDS) to create a 30-year panel of respondents (who were between 0 and 15 in the first wave) and their children. The panel will track residents, even those who have migrated across Tanzania or internationally, taking advantage of the demonstrated success in tracking from a pilot study conducted in 2019-2020. This panel will include data on education, location, marriage, fertility and consumption for the full sample and additional focused modules on 1) individual preferences, 2) networks among family members and 3) intra-household allocation processes. Each of these modules will be administered in one third of the sample with households randomly assigned to one of the phases. We expect 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 project is directed by a strong group of international researchers with experience in survey design and administration, migration, and household formation. Four members of the team have extensive experience in earlier rounds of the KHDS, creating a strong inter-temporal link. Our 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 about forty to their parents at the same ages in the first wave of the survey. The data allows us to examine education transmission in up to four generations—for both men and women—and the transmission of consumption inequality for two generations. In addition, we will examine the transition to adulthood of respondents in this sample focusing on the gender process of household formation and the role of migration in the transition schooling to work. The ultimate goal of the project is to measure degree to which poverty (absolute and relative) is transmitted across generations and to describe the process by which the respondents accumulate human capital and respond to shocks so as to identify the gaps in support that are most likely to prevent these young adults from escaping poverty.
