Evolutionary demography and intrahousehold time allocation: School attendance and child labor among the Okavango Delta Peoples of Botswana

The ways in which resources are allocated within households and/or families, especially within the context of children's time allocation to labor and schooling, has long been a subject of concern to demographers and economists. Differential investment in children and resulting differences in activity budgets may have significant effects on children's growth and development as well as on aspects of reproduction. This study uses predictions regarding parental investment in the embodied capital of offspring generated by evolutionary theory to examine the pattern of children's time allocation to labor and schooling among the Okavango Delta Peoples of Botswana. Models incorporating individual costs and benefits of resource allocation, conflicts of interests between men and women and between parents and offspring, and the effects of family composition, subsistence ecology, and gender are developed and applied to data on time allocation, household demography, and household economy. Several findings emerged: (1) The availability of alternative productive tasks strongly affects intra- and intergenerational labor substitution. (2) The presence of similarly aged children of the same sex within the household decreases the likelihood of both boys and girls engaging in a specific productive activity and increases the likelihood of children's school attendance. (3) Birth order, the labor needs of the household, and parents' marital status all affect school attendance. These results have implications for understanding the determinants of children's time allocation to labor and schooling and consequent impacts on development, health, and welfare. (C) 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.