A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Female Primary Education as a Means of Reducing HIV/AIDS in Tanzania
- Presenter:
Chair: David Bishai; Discussant: TBA Tue June 6, 2006 10:45-12:15 Room 325
HIV-AIDS has affected Sub-Saharan Africa more than any other region, with the December 2004 estimate by UNAIDS being 26 million out of a world total of 39 million. One estimate of the consequences of this pandemic has it lowering life expectancies by a quarter, from 64 to 47 years. Much of the development progress in the region in the last half-century is in danger of being reversed. Intervention is clearly required. In order to establish priorities, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is required as resources are very limited in Africa.
The issue as to which type of interventions to finance is especially important given the gender and age dimension of the Sub-Saharan African HIV-AIDS epidemic. The December 2003 UNAIDS update points out that African women are 1.2 times more likely to be infected with HIV than men. Among young people aged 15-24 (a good index of the number of new cases) women were 2.5 times more likely to be infected. Some of the gender differential is due to biological factors. But, some of the cause is due to the sociological power structure between the sexes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Interventions that seek to empower females, especially young females, would seem to be especially worth evaluating. Female education has been identified by the World Bank (2002) as one of most promising ways of combating HIV-AIDS because of the empowerment it provides.
In this article we carry out a CBA of female primary education in Tanzania based on panel data for 20 Mainland regions over the period 1994-2001. Schooling clearly targets the young. In Tanzania, primary schooling is the predominate form. 61% of females in 2000/1 had been through some primary education, while only 4% has been to secondary school, and 1% had a diploma or degree. The center-piece of our analysis involves establishing the effectiveness of female primary enrollments to reduce HIV-AIDS. This is the main contribution of the paper as there is an extensive literature which finds a positive relation between education and infection rates, contrary to most expectations. We treat this positive relation as the direct effect of schooling and regard it as coming from a static estimation framework. We then identify an indirect effect of education working through changes in income that has the opposite effect. Using a dynamic estimation approach developed by Arellano and Bond (1991) we are able to show that the indirect effect outweighs the direct effect, producing the net effect that education lowers infection rates.
The CBA that follows involves valuing the estimated number of HIV cases averted by their earnings, i.e., using the human capital approach, and comparing this with the costs for the enrollment numbers that generated the reduced number of infections. While the magnitude of the net-benefits depends crucially on the size of the discount rate used, our best estimate is that the benefits are between 1.3 to 2.9 times the costs. We highlight the role of external effects of female education as being the mechanism generating the favorable cost-benefit outcome.
