The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was established in 1975. IFPRI is one of 15 agricultural research centers that receive principal funding from governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations, most of which are members of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTORS AND PARTNERS IFPRI's research, capacity strengthening, and communications work is made possible by its financial contributors and partners. IFPRI receives its principal funding from governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations, most of which are members of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). IFPRI gratefully acknowledges the generous unrestricted funding from

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Journal articleIFPRI3; ISI; CRP2; GRP42EPTD; PHND; PIMPRCGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM

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This paper explores the causal relationship between primary schooling and adult HIV status in Malawi and Uganda, two East African countries with some of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Using data from the 2010 Malawi Demographic Health Survey and the 2011 Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey, the paper takes advantage of a natural experiment, the implementation of Universal Primary Education policies in the mid 1990s. An instrumented regression discontinuity approach is used to model the relationship between increased primary schooling and adult women's HIV status. Results indicate that a one-year increase in schooling decreases the probability of an adult woman testing positive for HIV by 0.06 (p < 0.01) in Malawi and by 0.03 (p < 0.05) in Uganda. These results are robust to a variety of model specifications. In a series of supplementary analyses a number of potential pathways through which such effects may occur are explored. Findings indicate increased primary schooling positively affects women's literacy and spousal schooling attainment in Malawi and age of marriage and current household wealth in Uganda. However primary schooling has no effect on recent (adult) sexual behavior.

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Demographic scholarship suggests that schooling plays an important role in transforming fertility preferences in the early stages of fertility decline. However, there is limited evidence on the relationship between schooling and fertility preferences that addresses the endogeneity of schooling. I use the implementation of Universal Primary Education (UPE) policies in Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia in the mid-1990s to conduct a fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis of the effect of schooling on women's desired fertility. Findings indicate that increased schooling reduced women's ideal family size and very high desired fertility across all three countries. Additional analyses of potential pathways through which schooling could have affected desired fertility suggest some pathways--such as increasing partner's education--were common across contexts, whereas other pathways were country-specific. This analysis contributes to demographic understandings of the factors influencing individual-level fertility behaviors and thus aggregate-level fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa.

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