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The Effect of the Free Primary Education Policy on School Enrolment and Relative Grade Attainment in Lesotho†


 We examine the impact of Lesotho’s Free Primary Education (FPE) programme on enrolment and relative grade attainment. The programme was sequentially implemented by first abolishing school fees in grade one in the year 2000. The timing of the implementation created changes in programme coverage across age groups over time. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits these variations to identify the effects of the FPE policy. Using data from the 2000 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey and the 2002 Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire survey, we find that the FPE policy increased enrolment of primary school-age children by 19.1 percentage points between 1999 and 2002. We also find that the policy had a negative effect on relative grade attainment: post-FPE, children had 0.15 fewer grades per year of age compared to pre-FPE. We do not find evidence of sibling effects.