Parental Support Part 1: School Fees

In many African families, children are expected to support their parents financially. This support can be for the essentials such as school fees for younger siblings, or even the luxuries such as holidays. This series of posts looks at four different forms of support parents expect from their children and offers advice on how to navigate parental support without compromising your financial future. As we close the year and get to the end of the #52WeekChallenge 2019, these posts are supposed to form a basis for our 2020 financial planning and beyond.

Of all forms of parental support, paying school fees for younger siblings is one expectation that is common to most African families, unless your parents are well off financially. There is the assumption that when parents do their best to educate you, it is then your obligation to help them educate those who follow you. The expectation may differ depending on your family set up. Some families expect you to chip in, while others will expect that once you get a job, you take over the education burden.

This expectation can be tough to take in, considering that once you get a job you want to just enjoy your money. The beauty of school fees support is that it is predictable and it has an endpoint – siblings will finish studying eventually.

The starting point for school fees support is to have an adult conversation with your parents. You want to agree on the total cost of schooling with them, and have them commit to meet some expenses, while you take care of others. Unless it is totally unavoidable, do not carry the entire school fees burden.

Secondly, have a conversation with your siblings to make them aware of the sacrifices you are making to take them through school to curb the entitlement that teens especially are sometimes known to have. Ensure they understand that this is the way family works, and they also will be expected to chip in either towards the younger ones’ education or towards supporting the parents in retirement. As a society, we do not have the luxury to live just for ourselves – maybe the next generation will be privileged to have this.

Finally, you may want to take it a step further and operate a revolving kind of a structure, where each sibling that gets a job contributes to this revolving fund that goes towards educating the younger ones. As more and more siblings finish schooling, the fund grows and it can eventually go towards building family assets. You can set up an investment fund that benefits all the siblings, or it can go towards the parents’ retirement support.