Essays on education and family planning

Human capital is an important factor of growth and development. According to UNICEF, human capital consists in giving to each child the opportunity not only to survive, but also the necessary conditions to develop and realize its potential. Based on household surveys in 21 countries in West and Cen- tral Africa, UNICEF estimate that nearly 32 millions children who have the official school age are not enrolled in school. Further, 17 millions school chil- dren are at high risk of exclusion. Regarding child Health, poor indicators also characterize this region. Indeed, according to WHO, the child death is increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa where children are over 15 times more chance to die before age five than children in developed regions. Economic difficulties appear as the first explanation of the obstacles to im- proving the well being of children both on the supply side and the demand side. This thesis ties together three essays on the link between armed conflict, education and child mortality and also on the relationship between fertility and children’s education in urban areas. The first chapter identifies the link between armed conflict and children out- comes. Using nationally representative household surveys, I exploit temporal and geographical variations of the 1999–2011 Ivorian political instability to identify its causal effect on children’s schooling and child mortality. The re- sults show that individuals who lived in conflict areas and who reached the official age to be enrolled in school within the period of the instability have a 10% lower probability of being enrolled in school. Students who spent their school years during the conflict and who lived in an affected area experienced a lag in schooling attainment of more than a year. Older students or those who were likely to be in high school during the conflict underwent a loss in schooling attainment of nearly two years. In addition, results show that the Ivorian armed conflict increased the mortality of children under five by at viii ix least 3%. My results also suggest that the deterioration of living conditions and the limitation of health service use during the conflict contribute to ex- plain these adverse effects. Robustness tests including a placebo tests suggest that the results are not driven by preexisting differences across conflict and non-conflict areas. The second chapter investigates the intra-urban disparities toward child quantity- quality trade-off by focusing on the case of Ouagadougou (the capital of Burkina Faso). In this city, at least 33% of the 2 million inhabitants live in informal settlements. This subpopulation lacks social infrastructure and has extremely low education attainments. Through a two-step control function approach, we investigate disparities in the Child Quantity Quality trade-off between formal and informal settlements in this city. We focus on differences in families’ behavior towards schooling in the two settlement types through children educational attainment. We find evidence of a child quantity and quality tradeoff in both settlements. By adapting long’s (2009) group com- parisons multiple testing procedures, we find that the trade-off is more acute in informal settlements. Moreover, if we assume that the endogeneity of the number of children is essentially due to the reverse causality, the results sug- gest some evidence that in the formal settlements parents take into account the children schooling in the decision of their number of children but its not the case in the informal ones. Additional results suggest the existence of settlement-specific unobserved heterogeneity, such as school quality and set- tlement peer effects. In term of policy recommendations, these results show that efforts to keep children in school should not be directed only toward rural areas. In addition to reducing schooling costs in some urban areas, particularly informal areas, and special emphasis should be put on raising awareness about the benefits of education for children and familiesÕ welfare. Finally, from the methodological point of view, our results show the impor- tance of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity among subpopulations in implementing policies, and analyzing the impact of those policies. Given the negative relationship between family size and children’s education, the third chapter explores the role of the types of contraceptive methods in birth spacing in urban areas. By distinguishing women from formal and informal settlements types, it investigate intra-urban disparities in the link between the type of contraceptive method and birth spacing in Ouagadougou x (Capital of Burkina Faso). The results show that both modern and tradi- tional methods increase birth spacing and decrease the probability that a next birth occurs in less than 24 months after the precedent one. Taking into ac- count the unobserved invariant characteristics do not significantly affect the magnitude of the coefficient for modern contraceptive use in both settlement types. However, in the informal settlement type, considering women fixed effect increase significantly the magnitude of the effect of traditional meth- ods. Traditional norms, the perception of family planning and the role of woman partner might contribute to explain this difference of behaviour be- tween the two settlement types. Therefore, to improve contraceptive use and their effectiveness, it is essential to prioritize actions depending to the type of subpopulation even in urban areas.

Keyphrases: School attainment, Family size, Birth spacing, Conflicts, Children mortality, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Heterogeneity, Family planning, Burkina Faso