# **1 Introduction**

The availability and cost of childcare have been shown to significantly affect adult labor supply in high-income countries, particularly for women. But there is less evidence on this relationship in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (Halim, Perova, and Reynolds 2021). Yet, a historical perspective highlights the important role of women’s labor supply in driving economic development. Understanding how childcare and adult labor supply interact is therefore crucial in these settings.

Sub-Saharan African countries differ from more frequently studied high-income countries in many ways relevant to this question. Households have more children on average but also more commonly have additional adults (UN 2020). Formal early childhood care availability is increasing, but from a low base and there are concerns around quality and cost (Samman et al. 2016). Older siblings play an important role in household childcare (Jakiela et al. 2020). Female labor participation is higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than any other region, but it is concentrated in informal household activities; this region also has the world’s highest gender gap in wage employment (ILO 2017). Households are more likely to engage in family farm or non-farm enterprises, which may be more accommodating of childcare needs than wage employment. It is not clear _a priori_ how these differences would affect the relationship between childcare needs and labor participation.

An important factor influencing household childcare needs is the availability of low- or no-cost schooling. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world closed schools in an effort to limit virus transmission. This paper leverages pandemic school closure policies in Kenya as exogenous shocks to household childcare burdens to provide empirical estimates of the impact of childcare responsibilities on adult labor supply in an LMIC setting in Africa.

Kenya closed all schools nationwide soon after its first COVID-19 cases in March 2020 and partially reopened schools for specific grades in October 2020, prior to fully reopening in January 2021. School closures increased household childcare needs—more so for households without young children already at home due to economies of scale—creating trade-offs in adults’ time allocation across childcare, work in different sectors, and leisure. We exploit the quasi-random variation in the timing that children enrolled in different grades were eligible to return to school and use data from the nationally-representative panel Kenyan Rapid Response Phone Survey to implement a difference-in-differences analysis comparing changes in labor supply after the partial reopening for adults in ‘treatment’ households with children in grades 4 or 8—eligible to return (99% did return)—against those with children in adjacent grades.

Having a child eligible to return to school increases adults’ labor supply in the weeks after reopening. Labor supply effects of the partial reopening are concentrated on the intensive margin: total work hours in the past 7 days increase by 3.6 (22%), driven by a 26% increase in household agriculture hours. We find no effects on labor participation or on wage employment or household enterprise hours, which may take longer to adjust.<sup>1</sup> Household agriculture is likely more flexible

> 1. Analysis of longer-term impacts is complicated by the fact that schools fully reopened in January 2021, meaning our comparison group also becomes ‘treated.’

2