Under the Education for All international commitment of the 1990s and early 2000 to ensure universal primary education by 2015, countries implemented school feeding programs, cash transfers, and abolishing mandatory fees. The East African countries implemented the Free Primary Education Policies (FPE) at different times-Uganda in 1997, Tanzania in 2001, and Kenya in 2003. Since FPE policies are meant to address inequalities in access, such as by SES, gender, and place of residence, I investigate the implications of the policies mitigating the inequality in access to schooling and learning quality and how the school environment changed. I explore these issues by taking advantage of two different rounds (2000 and 2007) of the Southern and Eastern Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) data. The evidence showed that Uganda continued to increase access among the rural poor and sustained the urban rich children's access to education after implementing its policy in 1997. Kenya's school access increased among the rural poor, while Tanzania increased access more among the urban poor. I did not find any significant changes in girls' representation in rural and urban schools in Kenya and Tanzania after implementing their FPE policies. However, rural girls' school access improved over the country's policy period in Uganda. Although FPE policies improved school access in East Africa, the evidence indicates that schools' human and physical resources did not improve to accommodate the increasing number of students. While school access improved in East Africa, the quality of learning, especially of rural girls, suffered. In all three countries, boys performed better than girls, but there were no gender differences in urban schools' performance. Tanzania's improvements in students' composition and reading scores after the FPE policy indicate a 'success' story. It is only in Tanzania where the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds increased, and the average reading scores improved nationally and in rural and urban schools. This is notable since these overall improvements were not accompanied by improved physical and human resources in the schools. I thus did not find specific evidence in the data that explained why Tanzania performed best among the East African countries over time. More research is needed to investigate Tanzania's 'success story' and whether differential FPE policy planning explains the differences in educational outcomes across the countries. The study has the following key implications for policy discussions. First, the study's primary policy implication is that 'free' is not enough unless other initiatives to improve education quality support such a policy. All three countries have free primary education, and Uganda had a decade of 'free' education (the period within this study's focus), but there are no overall positive trends on the relationship between access and education quality in East Africa. Second, the evidence indicates that rural children attended schools with fewer resources, and they came from families with fewer resources than urban families, which subjected rural children to double jeopardy in their learning opportunities. Since most children in East Africa still reside in rural areas, improving school participation and raising the learning levels of rural children must be at the forefront of the policies to achieve sustainable development goals in East Africa. Third, I only found evidence of the gender-achievement gap in rural schools, not in urban ones. The East African countries should commission studies to examine the reasons for rural girls' poor performance and identify ways of correcting them.
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