Education and Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. Students in Kenyan primary schools wear uniforms which typically cost about $6. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary school (from 2003 to 2005). Girls in those schools were 2.4 percentages point less likely to drop out of primary school by 2005, and 4.5 percentage points more likely to have graduated from primary school by 2007. These effects correspond to changes of -13 percent and +9 percent, respectively. By the end of 2005, girls who received uniforms were 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married and 1.5 percentage points (10 percent) less likely to have started childbearing. The effects persisted after the end of the education subsidy: at the end of 2007, when most of these adolescents had left school, girls in the treatment group were still 2.6 percentage points (8 percent) less likely to have started childbearing. These results imply a surprisingly large impact of access to education of adolescent girls on early fertility, at least among girls who are likely to drop out of school.