Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it

by Abhijit V. Banerjee

Putting these different results together, a coherent story starts to emerge. Girls in Kenya know perfectly well that unprotected sex leads to pregnancy. But if they think that the prospective father will feel obliged to take care of them once they give birth to his child, getting pregnant may not be such a bad thing after all. In fact, for the girls who cannot afford a school uniform and therefore cannot stay in school, having a child and starting a family of her own may be a relatively attractive option, compared to just staying at home and becoming the general “Hey, you” for the whole family, the usual outcome for unmarried out-of-school teenage girls. This makes older men more attractive partners than young boys who cannot yet afford to get married (at least when the girls don’t know that they are more likely to have HIV). Uniforms reduce fertility by giving girls the ability to stay in school, and thus a reason not to be pregnant. But the sex-education program, because it discourages extramarital sex and promotes marriage, focuses the girls on finding a husband (who more or less has to be a sugar daddy), undoing the effect of the uniforms.