Fosterage is an important cultural institution which serves to strengthen kinship solidarity among a range of other functions including meeting needs for child labour. Its effects on education are ambiguous. This study examines fostering as a possible contributor to the low levels of educational access and progress in the district using secondary data and interviews with key informants and foster-carers. The effects of fosterage on schooling depend somewhat on the circumstances of the sending and receiving homes, the reason for fostering children between them and the extent to which the two homes cooperate to provide for access to education. Nonetheless, fostered children do typically experience lower levels of access to meaningful education. This is partly because they tend to live in areas and attend schools where meaningful access is lower, but the individual "Cinderella effect" of fosterage is found to be palpable, especially for girls, so that being fostered, even to a more economically advantaged households does not typically benefit the foster child educationally and on balance is associated with a worsening of their educational access. Fostered children on average enrol in school less often, drop out more often and achieve less in school, especially when compared to biological children in the same home rather than to children in homes which host no foster children. (Contains 8 footnotes, 14 tables, and 4 figures.)