University was commissioned to look among other issues at the possibilities of reforming the entire education system. The committee recommended that the 7-4-2-3-system be changed to an 8-4-4-system (8 years of primary school, 4 years of secondary and 4 years of university)<sup>11</sup> . That new system was launched in January 1985. The switch affected those who were already in the 7th year as they had to stay one more year in primary school. As a result, the secondary schools had one class less for a whole year. Four years later, the universities had to contend with double intake of freshers (the 8-4-4 group and the last group from the old system)<sup>12</sup> .

**_Students subject to the reform were exogenously constrained to stay one more year in primary school if they wanted to get their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE)._** On average, students would graduate from primary school at age 14 instead of previously 13, and they would get their East-African School Certificate at the end of secondary school at age 18 instead of 17. Some children may have entered school later than at age 6, they may have dropped out and reentered primary school thus graduating older. However, our dataset only reports information on the number of years spent in school and we’ll assume that these correspond to continuous schooling since age 6. This means that the first cohort to be subject to the change in law was born in 1971. In the 1980s, 60% of Kenyan girls had completed at least the KCPE, so the Reform affected a large number of teenagers.

**_The sharp discontinuity in the number of years spent in school will be the core of our identification strategy._** The left panel of Figure 5 shows the discontinuity in the number of years spent in school to complete primary (blue) and secondary schooling (green). We see clearly that, starting in 1971, students were compelled to stay one more year in primary school to get their end-of-curriculum degree. However, the discontinuity in the number of years spent in secondary school seems to occur before 1971, suggesting that older students may have delayed entry into secondary school and thus be subject to the reform even if they were born before 1971. One could argue that, due to the educational change, fewer students completed primary and secondary schooling, if they really had planned on leaving school after 7 or 11 years. The right panel of Figure 5 shows on the contrary that completion rates did not decrease in the years following the reform: enrollment rates underwent a steady rise in the number of students completing primary and secondary school.

Figure 6 shows a scatter plot of the proportion of girls who were pregnant with their first child by age 20. While teenage pregnancy and union rates decreased over 1955-1980 at a rather steady rate (left panel), teenage pregnancies of girls having at least completed secondary school went down from an average of 65% to 25%, most of the drop occurring for birth cohorts in the late 1960s. The discontinuity suggests a drop of about 20 percentage points. Those preliminary results are confirmed by Table 2: teenage fertility decreased dramatically in Kenya over the past decades. While only 27% of the 1956-60 cohort had not given birth by age 20, the figures jumped to 59% for the last cohort (1976-80). If we look at the two threshold cohorts around the threshold (196670 and 1971-75) in Table 2: fertility at age 19 bears the highest difference (4 percentage points), suggesting that this group reduces most its fertility between the two cohorts.

**_One should however be worried by self-selection into schooling levels if teenagers who decide to complete primary (or secondary) school are different before and after the reform._** While we cannot check the potential differences in unobservable characteristics, a simple comparison before and after of students’ observable characteristics (Table 4) shows no significant difference in the selection process.

> 11 See Figure 4. 12 Kenya Ministry of Education.

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