Strip estate planning down to its engine and it is one job: moving what a family has built into the next generation with the least loss. Most families think that job is about land, titles, and wills. Those matter, and...
Strip estate planning down to its engine and it is one job: moving what a family has built into the next generation with the least loss. Most families think that job is about land, titles, and wills. Those matter, and this series has spent many articles on them. But the largest transfer most African families will ever make is not a parcel of land. It is school fees. Paid termly, in cash, under pressure, for fifteen to twenty years per child, fees are the single biggest deliberate transfer of capital from one generation to the next that an ordinary family makes.
Which means fees decisions are estate decisions. And the evidence says one class of those decisions outperforms nearly everything else a family can do with money: educating its daughters.
This is not a sentimental claim. It is an arithmetic one, and the arithmetic has been checked for decades.
The World Bank's Psacharopoulos and Patrinos have spent their careers compiling every credible estimate of what education pays. Their decennial review pulls together 1,120 estimates across 139 countries, and the headline has barely moved in fifty years: the private return to one extra year of schooling averages about 9 percent a year, and it is stable across decades (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, 2018). Read that as an investor would. A 9 percent annual return, compounding over a working life of thirty to forty years, is a return that most land, most rental houses, and nearly all family businesses do not reliably deliver.
Now the part that matters for this article. The same review finds that women consistently experience higher average returns to schooling than men, which is why its authors state flatly that girls' education remains a priority (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, 2018). The World Bank's Missed Opportunities study put a price on the failure: barriers that stop girls completing twelve years of education cost countries between 15 and 30 trillion dollars in lost lifetime productivity and earnings, and women with secondary education earn almost twice as much as women with none (Wodon et al., 2018). The Bank estimates that closing the gap could add 2.4 trillion dollars to African incomes by 2040 (World Bank).
Those are national numbers, but they are built from family-sized decisions. When your family pays a daughter's secondary fees to completion, you are buying an asset with a documented, compounding yield. When you stop paying, you are selling that asset at its lowest price.
Here is what makes a daughter's education different in kind from other assets, not just in rate of return. It transmits twice.
The first transmission is her own earnings. The second runs through her children, and it is enormous. A study in The Lancet examined child mortality in 175 countries between 1970 and 2009, a period in which women's average schooling in developing countries rose from 2.2 years to 7.2 years. Of the 8.2 million fewer deaths of children under five per year by the end of that period, the authors attributed 4.2 million, just over half, to the increased education of women of reproductive age (Gakidou et al., 2010). Half of the entire global gain in child survival over forty years traced back to mothers who had spent more years in school. The Missed Opportunities study adds the rest of the chain: universal secondary education for girls would largely end child marriage, cut early childbearing, reduce under-five mortality and stunting, and lower fertility (Wodon et al., 2018).
In the language of this series, an educated daughter is a transmission channel. Her schooling does not stop with her. It shows up in whether her children survive infancy, how tall they grow, how long they stay in school, and what they earn. No title deed does that. A parcel of land passes to one generation. A daughter's education passes through at least two, and the second transfer costs the family nothing extra.
Now hold that evidence next to a pattern many families will recognise. The same family that sacrificed to put a daughter through school will, at succession time, quietly write her out of the land. The reasoning is old and everyone can recite it: she will marry, she will belong to another clan, the land must stay with the sons, her brothers will look after her if things go badly.
Understand what that decision actually does. The family has spent fifteen years building its highest-yielding asset, and then, at the exact moment of transfer, it cuts that asset off from the family's capital base. The daughter who was worth school fees is judged not worth an acre. She enters adulthood with education but without collateral, without a fallback if her marriage fails, and without a stake that ties her prosperity back to the family that raised her. Families that educate daughters but disinherit them are dismantling their own transmission channel with their own hands.
The law, at least in Uganda, has already left this position behind. The Succession (Amendment) Act, 2022 recognises the equal inheritance rights of female and male heirs, abolishes the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, and applies to men's and women's estates alike (Succession (Amendment) Act, 2022%20Act,%202022.pdf); Nannozi Advocates, 2025). Under intestacy, daughters and sons now share equally in the 75 percent that goes to children. Property grabbing, the seizure of a widow's or orphan's home and land by relatives, is now an explicit criminal offence, and the fact that Parliament had to criminalise it tells you how routinely it happened. Organisations like FIDA Uganda have spent decades on precisely these cases, and reporting on Ugandan widows describes women turned into strangers in their own compounds within weeks of a burial (Global Press Journal). A daughter without land of her own is one funeral away from being that widow.
So a family that disinherits its daughters today is not even choosing custom over law. It is choosing a version of custom the law has already overruled, and inviting the exact litigation this series keeps warning about.
There is a second, quieter version of the same decision, and it happens long before any will is written. It happens in February, when the harvest disappointed and three sets of fees are due and the money covers two.
No family meeting announces that sons come first. But the evidence from Uganda shows what happens in practice. Economist Martina Björkman-Nyqvist used rainfall variation as a natural experiment on Ugandan households: when a bad season cut household income, girls' school enrollment fell significantly, especially for older girls, while boys' enrollment was largely unaffected. Even where school was free and both attended, an income shock damaged girls' test scores but not boys'. Her conclusion is blunt: households respond to income shocks by varying the schooling and resources given to girls, while boys are to a large extent sheltered (Björkman-Nyqvist, 2013).
Translate that out of economics. When money tightens, the daughter is the shock absorber. She is pulled first, fed the leftovers of the fees budget, and returned to school last, if at all. Each interruption compounds against her the way the returns would have compounded for her. And because it is never decided out loud, no one in the family ever has to defend it.
A family serious about its own arithmetic should find this alarming, not because it is unkind, but because it is expensive. In the bad year, the family is liquidating its highest-return asset first. That is the opposite of what any competent treasurer would do.
The remedy is not a feeling. Feelings are what produced the current pattern. The remedy is two written rules, adopted at your next family meeting, recorded in the minutes, and applied without discussion in the bad years precisely because they were agreed in a good one.
First, a written fees policy: this family pays fees for daughters and sons on equal terms, to completion, and if income falls, the cut is shared equally or the family borrows against the asset with the highest documented return, which the evidence says is the girl. Write it down, because February will test it.
Second, the will: every daughter named, by name, with her share of land and property, on the same basis as her brothers, as the Succession (Amendment) Act already presumes. Not a promise that her brothers will look after her. A named share, on paper, witnessed.
Your family is already doing estate planning every time fees season comes. The only question is whether you keep running the old plan, the one that pays for a daughter's education and then cancels the inheritance that would let it compound, or whether you write the two sentences that fix it. One evening, two rules, and the highest-return investment your family makes finally gets treated like one.