Expanding Access to School in Nigeria: Impact on Marital Outcomes

The paper uses the Universal Primary Education Program (UPE) implemented in Nigeria in 1976 to investigate the effect of wife and husband’s education on women’s empowerment. We combine regional disparities in baseline levels of enrollment with the timing of the program and the traditionally high age difference between partners to disentangle the impact of wife’s education from husband’s education. We find that the UPE had heterogeneous effects in the South compared to the North of Nigeria. In the South, women achieve more gender-equal marriages by delaying marriage by 1.23 years, and by reducing the age gap with their husband by 2 years. These women also maintain a stable education gap with their husband. In the North, unions’ characteristics remain unchanged except for the probability to marry a polygamous partner that increases when husbands are treated. In both regions, women are better off as the UPE decreases women’s tolerance of domestic violence and increases their say in decision-making (in the South only) but the mechanics of the effects differ: Northern women are made better off by the education of their husband’s whereas Southern women are better off thanks to the combined effects of their own education and their husband’s.

Speaker: Sarah Deschênes (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Economics Department of Northwestern University)