Female Education and Brideprice: Evidence from Primary Education Reform in Uganda

Abstract

Universal primary education (UPE) policies have been shown to improve educational attainment and delay marriage and childbearing, particularly among rural girls. This disproportionate improvement in female relative to male education can change the bargaining structure between the wife and the husband. Furthermore, with the expectation of this change, decisions about marriage-market entry, matching, and marital arrangements, such as brideprice, can change. Greater female bargaining power can increase the share of marriages without a brideprice in settings where husbands may demand a refund upon divorce. Using first-hand data on marital transfers and exploiting Uganda’s UPE, which abolished primary school fees in 1997, this study shows that longer UPE exposure is associated positively with female education and negatively with brideprice practice. The results imply that UPE policies can affect women’s marital lives by empowering them in household decisions. The study also discusses the consistency of the results with other potential mechanisms, such as selective marriage-market entry, marital squeeze, and assortative matching.