Female Education and Brideprice
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
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Universal primary education (UPE)
policies have been shown to improve educational attainment
and delay marriage and childbearing, particularly among
rural girls. This disproportionate improvement in female
relative to male education can change the bargaining
structure between the wife and the husband. Furthermore,
with the expectation of this change, decisions about
marriage-market entry, matching, and marital arrangements,
such as brideprice, can change. Greater female bargaining
power can increase the share of marriages without a
brideprice in settings where husbands may demand a refund
upon divorce. Using first-hand data on marital transfers and
exploiting Uganda’s UPE, which abolished primary school fees
in 1997, this study shows that longer UPE exposure is
associated positively with female education and negatively
with brideprice practice. The results imply that UPE
policies can affect women’s marital lives by empowering them
in household decisions. The study also discusses the
consistency of the results with other potential mechanisms,
such as selective marriage-market entry, marital squeeze,
and assortative matching.
Palabras clave
UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION, FEMALE EDUCATION, BRIDEPRICE, UGANDA