Women’s Schooling, Fertility, and Child Health Outcomes: Evidence from Uganda’s Free Primary Education Program

This paper examines the role of women’s education on fertility and child health in Uganda. To identify causal effects, I exploit the timing of a national reform that eliminated primary school fees in 1997 to implement a regression discontinuity design. Women with more schooling both delay and reduce overall fertility, increase early child health investments, and have less chronically malnourished children. In terms of mechanisms, education increases wealth as well as knowledge and practice of family planning, particularly when women are young. Schooling also delays marriage, but does not appear to alter who women marry or more general bargaining power within the household.