REFRAMING THE JOURNEY TO SCHOOL TO FOSTER EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND MOBILITY JUSTICE IN AFRICA: A MULTI-LEVEL MIXED METHOD INQUIRY

Abstract

Global efforts to expand access to quality education have largely focused on in-school reforms, such as teacher training, school choice, and performance metrics, assuming access can be achieved through policy and institutional change alone. However, a critical yet underexamined factor shapes educational access well before students enter classrooms: the journey to school. In many African contexts, walking remains the primary mode of travel, exposing youth to long distances, unsafe routes, poor infrastructure, environmental hazards, and emotional stress. These conditions increase risks of absenteeism, exclusion, and dropout, yet remain peripheral in education research. When youth mobility is addressed in adjacent fields, it is often framed within Western, urban, and health-focused paradigms, disconnected from educational equity concerns. Guided by the Mobility Justice Framework, this study conceptualizes mobility as shaped by intersecting social, political, and structural forces that determine who can move, how, and under what conditions. The study is guided by three research questions that focuses on Africa: (1) How do popular educational policies, frameworks, and interventions address mobility barriers within the JTS? (2) How does the journey to school influence educational access and experiences of African youth? (3) To what extent do different typologies of (im)mobilities influence perceptions of school access? Using a three-paper, multi-level mixed-methods design, the dissertation answers these questions by synthesizing fragmented scholarship, identifying barriers to equitable access, and centering youth and public perspectives. Methods include a critical literature review; Semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping with 14 former African secondary students; and descriptive statistics and logistic regression analyses of survey data from 36 African countries. Findings are integrated and triangulated to generate policy implications across macro (policies), micro (youth experiences), and meso levels (public perception), foregrounding mobility justice as the ability to move safely, freely, and with dignity. At the macro level, the study finds that dominant educational frameworks have increasingly prioritized in-school interventions aimed at improving educational quality while overlooking the mobility conditions embedded within the JTS as structural dimensions of educational access and equity (Chapter 2).At the micro level, the study finds that journeys to and from school are inequitable and have clear implications for access, student experiences, and life outcomes, necessitating research and policy to consider the JTS and (im)mobility (Chapter 3). At the meso level, the study finds that mobility challenges are recognized in public perceptions as important issues but remain weakly prioritized, creating disconnects between mobility inequalities, educational access, and public priorities. These findings also highlight important implications for how educational access is studied, including the need for more justice-oriented approaches and further research on the relationship between mobility, inequality, and the gap between perceptions and realities of educational access (Chapter 4). Collectively, the findings reframe educational access as a dynamic and embodied process shaped by unequal mobility systems and position mobility justice as essential to advancing educational equity. In doing so, the study provides an integrated framework for embedding mobility justice within education research, policy, and practice while advancing more holistic and contextually grounded understandings of educational access.