School Fee Abolition and Educational Access in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Enrollment Effects

This systematic review will synthesize evidence on the abolition or reduction of mandatory school fees, including free primary education, universal primary and secondary education, secondary fee abolition, capitation grants that replace fees, tuition removal, and comparable instruments and its relationship to educational access in Sub-Saharan Africa. The review will address how these policies are associated with access outcomes (enrollment, attendance, completion, dropout, and out-of-school children) across primary and secondary education, how associations vary by policy type, educational level, country, and time since implementation, and what implementation conditions, equity dimensions, and unintended consequences shape these outcomes. A nested meta-analysis will target the effect of fee-abolition policies on school enrollment, contingent on identifying at least eight studies reporting comparable, extractable effect sizes at full-text extraction; if that threshold is not met, the enrollment evidence will be synthesized using structured narrative synthesis. Records will be retrieved from five sources: Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, Google Scholar, and African Journals Online (AJOL). The review will follow PRISMA 2020 reporting guidelines.