Age at First Child Does Education Delay Fertility Timing? The Case of Kenya

Abstract

Completing additional years of education
 necessarily entails spending more time in school. There is
 naturally a rather mechanical effect of schooling on
 fertility if women tend not to have children while
 continuing to attend high school or college, thus delaying
 the beginning of and shortening their reproductive life.
 This paper uses data from the Kenyan Demographic and Health
 Surveys of 1989, 1993, 1998, and 2003 to uncover the impact
 of staying one more year in school on teenage fertility. To
 get around the endogeneity issue between schooling and
 fertility preferences, the analysis uses the 1985 Kenyan
 education reform as an instrument for years of education.
 The authors find that adding one more year of education
 decreases by at least 10 percentage points the probability
 of giving birth when still a teenager. The probability of
 having one's first child before age 20, when having at
 least completed primary education, is about 65 percent;
 therefore, for this means a reduction of about 15 percent in
 teenage fertility rates for this group. One additional year
 of school curbs the probability of becoming a mother each
 year by 7.3 percent for women who have completed at least
 primary education, and 5.6 percent for women with at least a
 secondary degree. These results (robust to a wide array of
 specifications) are of crucial interest to policy and
 decision makers who set up health and educational policies.
 This paper shows that investing in education can have
 positive spillovers on health.