Causal Mechanisms Linking Education with Agency, Gender Attitudes, and Participation in Groups

• In Event: Leveraging education for power and protest: Evidence and practice from a systematic review and projects in Bangladesh, India, and Zambia

Proposal

Beyond the goal of improving levels of attainment and learning, investment in education in recent decades has, in part, been based on an expectation that a better educated population would also be a healthier one. In this systematic review, we test this assumption by evaluating whether changes in education causally impact the hypothesized mediators of the relationship between education and fertility, HIV, and child mortality. As the main independent variable, education includes educational attainment, learning including literacy and numeracy, age at leaving school, and socialization. Our theoretical framework covers 26 hypothesized mediators related to knowledge, attitudes, resources, agency, and health related behaviors and harmful practices. For this panel, we will focus on three mediators: agency, participation in community groups, and gender attitudes. Previous evidence shows that women with greater education may also have more autonomy and voice in their communities (Jejeebhoy, 1995; LeVine et al., 2012; Vikram et al., 2012), both of which may be antecedents to broader civic participation. Furthermore, gender attitudes, particularly those that are more egalitarian relative to normative gender attitudes, may motivate civic participation and protest.

Including only experimental and quasi-experimental studies from low and middle-income countries, we began with a review of 46,382 papers relevant to all 26 mediators. Following title and abstract, full text, and data extraction reviews, we have 128 studies that fit our inclusion criteria for further meta-analysis and narrative synthesis. Of these 128 studies, 2 focus on the causal impact of education on participation in groups, 11 on agency, and 16 on gender attitudes. We will synthesize evidence on these three mechanisms, and present descriptive statistics on the countries these studies focused on, target populations, and measurement indicators used. In addition, we will highlight key results from these studies, and draw conclusions about the role of education in impacting precursors to civic participation across diverse contexts.

Author

• Fatima Zahra, Population Council