Short-sighted or short of money: the influence of vision problems on academic performance.

Abstract

Education plays an important role in poverty reduction, as it fosters economic growth and social development, as well as ensuring the well-being of children. In this context and taking into account that developing countries lack either the financial resources or the political will to meet the educational needs of their citizens, identifying the factors that hinder the educational process is particularly relevant in order to implement educational aids to fill the educational gaps. For this reason, throughout this paper we have tried to go beyond purely academic factors and have analysed other factors that also affect academic performance. Specifically, using the PASEC 2019 database that collected a large amount of contextual information about students in Sub-Saharan African countries, we have tried to analyse the effect that having poor vision has on academic performance. In this sense, having short or long-sightedness has a negative influence on academic performance and this effect does not seem to be mitigated by wearing glasses, which leads us to think that it may be due to wearing poorly prescribed glasses.