School Quality, Literacy, and the Differences in Fertility across Regions

Claus C. Portner, Seattle University

Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertility decline has progressed much slower than in other regions. Although many explanations have been advanced to explain this, there has so far been little focus on the potential role of differences in school quality. Partly motivated by the strong negative association between female education and fertility, many developing countries significantly expanded access to education starting in the 1970s. However, the quality of education often declined with the increased enrollment. This reduction in quality was especially severe for primary education, with Sub-Saharan Africa doing particularly badly. As a first step towards understanding the role of school quality on the relationship between female education and fertility, this paper examines whether the differential literacy skills acquired by grade levels across countries may help explain differences in fertility outcomes across regions. The data comes from all Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Unicef’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) from countries in East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, collected between 1986 and 2022. Using data from approximately 5,000,000 women across the four regions, I plan on estimating individual-level fertility outcomes as a function of literacy, region, age, and cohort by area of residence.

Keywords: Fertility, Economic Demography, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Population and Development

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