The effect of government educational investment on the performance of primary school pupils in he Yaounde VI subdivision

Abstract

Education is the right of every child and primary education is compulsory. Primary education is universally accepted as the foundation laying level of education in all nations of the world.It provides the mini-structural framework on which the quality of other levels of education is anchored. It is on this premise that this study has as main objective to examine the effect of Cameroon’s government educational investment on the performance of pupils in public primary schools of Cameroon and specifically in the Yaoundé VI municipality in the center region. This study was grounded on two theories: The Human Capital Theory and the Theory of Academic Performance. Three hypotheses were formulated based on the three variables: infrastructural investment, investment in didactic materials and human capital investment, to determine their effect on primary school pupil’s performance. 210 pupils and 6 head teachers from 6 selected public primary schools in Yaoundé VI municipality were involved in this survey. Using a convergent parallel research design, a questionnaire and an interview guide were used for data collection. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data with the help of SPSS 20.0. Results revealed that government’s educational investment has an effect on the performance of primary school pupils. The hypotheses were retained at 0.05 level of significance, implying that infrastructural investment (r = 0.225, P= 0.001 ≤ 0.05), didactic material investment (r = 0.148, P= 0.032 ≤ 0.05) and human capital investment (r = 0.261, P= 0.000 ≤ 0.05) affects pupil’s academic performance. The researcher thus recommends the government to increase the budget allocated for the provision of infrastructures, didactic materials and human capital in the primary education sector, to pay attention to policies that enhance educational attainment, to improve and regularly provide teachers with incentives, to train and to evenly distribute qualified teachers to all primary schools, as well as to improve in-service teacher training amongst others.