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This study examines effects of household shocks on children’s schooling in Tanzania. Using data from the Tanzania National Panel Survey - 2008–2013 and the randomeffects probit regression model, the study analyses the link between the shocks and child schooling, measured by school attendance and truancy. The results show that the shocks (weather, food price rises and death of a family member) affect school attendance. Furthermore, education of the head of the household increases the probability of child school attendance and reduces the probability of child truancy. Access to credit is found to increase the probability of child school attendance. Therefore, measures to help the poor and marginalized households to afford their children’s education include improving their access to credit and establishing pro-poor policies, such as improving irrigation schemes and promoting drought-resistant crops, which would enhance agricultural production, increase incomes and improve vulnerability to shocks.

Nigeria. Previous studies failed to link health expenditure appropriately to family planning and poverty alleviation in Nigeria. This study addresses this theoretical gap by employing the vector error correction mechanism (VECM) in analysing the interrelationship between government fiscal health, family planning and poverty rate in Nigeria by employing time series data from1977 to 2019. The data were tested for stationarity and found to be statistically significant at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the VECM showed that GDPP, SGHE, POVR and MMORR significantly explain 44.49% variation in family planning, while the ECM coefficient indicates a speed of adjustment of 5.372%; and it is statistically significant. The FEVD of family planning (FP) indicated that the variability of the SGHE was also rising between 0.193528% in the second period to 2.811% in the tenth period. The variability in POVR accounted for 1.008% of the variation in FP in the second period. The variation in poverty rate fell relatively over the forecast horizon such that at the tenth period it was 1.888%. The study concluded that the government’s fiscal health expenditure has a positive but insignificant impact on FP, but a negative impact on POVR and MMORR in Nigeria. It is recommended that the government should increase its fiscal health expenditure significantly. This can be achieved via an increase in the budgetary allocation for the health sector.

This study examines the determinants of healthcare investment in Sub-SaharanAfrica from 1999 to 2017 involving 35 SSA countries. The econometrics methodsused in the study involves the fixed effect and random effect models, and thegeneralized method of moments (GMM-SYS). The results of the static model showedthat GDP per capita, population and inflation positively affect investment in SubSaharan Africa, while debt service as a share of GDP negatively impacts healthcareinvestment in SSA. On the other hand, the GMM results showed that GDP percapita, population, growth, inflation, and debt service as a share of GDP have anegative relationship with healthcare investment, while infant mortality rate has apositive influence on healthcare investment in SSA. The study recommends that forSSA to improve the health sector and reduce incidences of malaria, HIV,tuberculosis, diarrhoea, and other diseases, it is important for both the governmentsand private investors to raise the level of healthcare investments to pay for betterhealthcare services, build more hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities; andbetter finance research and development in the health sector.Keywords: healthcare investment, per capita, population, debt service and infantmortality rate.