Fertility Responses to Schooling Costs: Evidence from Uganda’s Universal Primary Education Policy

There is some evidence that access to schooling reduces fertility along the intensive margin in developing countries, but the transmission channels are not well understood; most education interventions impact financial costs, access, and school quality. We isolate the specific effect of child school fees on maternal fertility by studying a 1997 schooling reform in Uganda, in which the government abolished elementary school fees for up to four children per household. Families with more school-aged children were required to pay fees for the additional ones. We demonstrate that eligibility limits reduced births: women with more than four children in 1997 were 4.2 percentage points less likely to give birth to an additional child in the subsequent 2 years. We provide evidence that this result is driven by universal primary education eligibility limits, not by other factors associated with the policy or other secular changes. Fertility effects are persistent over time and survive the lifting of the eligibility limit in 2003. The policy is also associated with a temporary reduction in the desired fertility, with mothers preferring to have four children or fewer during the policy period than before.