Impact of Child Labour on Educational Attainment in Adulthood: Evidence from Rural Tanzania

This study examines whether and to what extend child labour affects educational attainment in adulthood. While there is a substantial body of literature investigating child labour, long-run effects remain almost entirely unexplored due to lack of panel data spanning a sufficiently long period of time. This study uses a newly available 13 year individual level panel data set from rural Tanzania to show that child labour reduces educational attainment in adulthood. Individuals who had worked an average amount as children (18 hours a week) attain just over half the number of years of education in adulthood compared to those who had not worked. This loss of education translates into a 7 percentage point loss in long-run consumption growth. The impact of child labour is, however, found to be substantially smaller among those who were already attending school at the time of the baseline survey.