Mechanisms Linking Education Development Interdisciplinary Access to Household Welfare in Kenya: Multilevel Causal Mediation Analysis

Education is widely regarded as a driver of household welfare in low-income countries, yet the mechanisms through which schooling translates into improved living standards remain inadequately theorised and empirically contested. Synthesising human capital theory, the capabilities approach and institutionalist perspectives on education quality, the analysis distinguishes three plausible mediating channels: labour market integration, health-related human capital and household decision-making agency. The article argues that conventional single-level regressions conflate these mechanisms and obscure the multilevel structure of educational opportunity, which is jointly produced by household resources, school quality and sub-county administrative capacity. A multilevel causal mediation analysis design is proposed, integrating the potential outcomes framework with hierarchical data structures to estimate indirect effects at household and school levels. The framework addresses key identification challenges, including mediator-outcome confounding and treatment effect heterogeneity across Kenya's diverse socioeconomic regions. The contribution is methodological and theoretical: it offers an explicit causal model for a policy-relevant problem while clarifying why interdisciplinary access initiatives may generate divergent welfare effects depending on which mediating pathway dominates in a given context.