Does Maternal Education Curb Female Genital Mutilation? Evidence from a Natural experiment in Egypt

Ahmed Rashad and Mesbah Sharaf

No 1497, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: In this study, we exploit a natural experiment, an education policy change reducing compulsory schooling from nine to eight years in Egypt, to estimate the causal impact of maternal education on mothers’ attitude toward female genital mutilation (FGM), the probability that their daughters undergo FGM, and their intention to perform FGM to her daughters in the future. We use a nationally representative sample of 16,572 ever-married women aged between 15-49 from the 2008 Egypt’s Demographic and Health Survey and utilize a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) framework to estimate the causal impact of maternal education on the three FGM outcomes. Our main findings suggest that maternal education did not discourage the actual implementation of the FGM practice in Egypt. It did not reduce either the probability of having a circumcised daughter or the motivation to perform FGM in the future. However, our results suggest maternal education had a favorable impact on the sentiment toward the FGM practice. The unexpected results maybe explained by the poor quality of schooling in Egypt on human capital protection and the power of traditionalism versus education

Pages: 22
Date: 2021-10-20, Revised 2021-10-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-dev and nep-hea
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