Universal Secondary Education, Schooling and Women's Empowerment: Evidence from Uganda

Abstract

With aid agencies’ support, Sub-Saharan African governments have prioritized improving access to post-primary education after the widespread adoption of free primary education. However, there needs to be more evidence on the impacts of such post-primary education expansion policies. We evaluate the long-term effects of Uganda’s Universal Secondary Education (USE) expansion policy on women’s educational achievements and empowerment. This USE policy, introduced in 2007, aims to improve access to secondary school education through the abolition of fees and increased school capacity at the community level. We exploit both birth cohort variation and regional variations in the exposure to the program and employ a difference-in-differences model to identify the causal effects of the policy. Our results indicate that women eligible for the program in areas with higher program intensity experienced a significant increase in educational attainment and improvement in women’s empowerment. The effect on women’s empowerment is most pronounced in the domain of human and social assets (precisely age at first sex, birth, cohabitation, and spouse schooling attainment difference) and less significant in gendered beliefs and attitudes. We further explore the potential channels underlying these effects and find that the USE program had a significant impact on women’s labour market outcomes and access to information. These findings establish the potential for governments in SSA to leverage secondary education investments in generating sustained improvement in women’s empowerment.