Evaluating the Role of Education as a Birth Control Policy in Burkina Faso: A Propensity Score Weighting Approach

Abstract

We use the 2014 round of Burkina Faso’s Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to identify and quantify the causal effect of women’s education on their fertility outcomes focusing on two fertility indicators: the total number of children ever born and the age at first birth. However, women's educational attainments may reflect the difference in term of access to schooling or individual characteristics such the family wealth, causing a threat to the empirical identification. In order to achieve consistent estimation, our empirical strategy follows Imbens (2000) and uses the propensity score weighting (PSW) approach to generate an appropriate counterfactual group accounting for education levels. Results from the PSW estimation suggest that education reduces the number of children per woman and delays women’s first birth in Burkina Faso. Hence, promoting girls education is an efficient policy to achieve birth control in Burkina Faso.