Kenyan Fertility Timing Linked to Education Reform, 1989-2003

1989 to 2003 data from Kenyan Demographic and Health Surveys used to analyze the impact of education on teenage fertility. The analysis employs the 1985 Kenyan education reform as an instrument to study the effect of additional schooling years. The dataset was used by author Céline Ferré to find that one more year of education reduces teenage birth probability by at least 10 percentage points.

Use Cases

• Modeling the causal impact of education reforms on fertility timing based on survey data
• Analyzing demographic trends across multiple survey waves (1989, 1993, 1998, 2003)
• Evaluating policy interventions using instrumental variable methods based on the 1985 reform

Strengths

• Data spans four distinct survey waves over a 14-year period (1989-2003)
• Analysis uses a specific policy event (1985 Kenyan education reform) as an instrument for causal inference

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the specific surveys

Provenance

Source

Kenyan Demographic and Health Surveys

Collection Method

Survey data collection

Time Range

1989, 1993, 1998, 2003

Geography

Kenya