Introduction of Sharia law in northern Nigeria: Decreases in infant mortality thru increased vaccination rates, duration of breastfeeding and prenatal health care; there were also increases in primary school enrollment

Islamic Law and Investments in Children: Evidence from the Sharia Introduction in Nigeria. Marco Alfano. Journal of Health Economics, July 21 2022, 102660. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2022.102660

Abstract: Islamic law lays down detailed rules regulating children’s upbringing. This study examines the effect of such rules on investments in children by analysing the introduction of Sharia law in northern Nigeria. Triple-differences estimates using temporal, geographical and religious variation together with large, representative survey data show decreases in infant mortality. Official government statistics further confirm improvements in survival. Findings also show that Sharia increased vaccination rates, duration of breastfeeding and prenatal health care. Evidence suggests that Sharia improved survival by specifying strict child protection laws and by formalising children’s duty to maintain their parents in old age or in sickness.

JEL: O15 J12 J13

Keywords: BreastfeedingInfant SurvivalIslamNigeria

5.3 Primary school enrolment

Panel C of table 2 reports the results pertaining to primary school enrolment. I use information contained in the household questionnaire to merge children to their mothers and select 16 children born 1989 to 1998 (aged between 4 and 13 at the time of interview). In Nigeria, the school year starts in September. Accordingly, I redefine the year of birth and recode children born after September as being born in the following year. The sample consists of 6,125 children, who enrolled between the (school) years 1993/94 and 2002/03.

To calculate the age at which each child started school, I combine information on the years of education a child completed together with his or her age at interview Only 4% of children aged 6 to 24 repeat a year of school and less than 0.1% of children in the same age bracket drop out (DHS Final Report, 2003). Since their school starting age cannot be precisely calculated, I omit these individuals from the analysis. In Nigeria, children should enrol in school at the age of 6. For the whole country in 2003, school enrolment was relatively low, 46% of girls and 41% of boys aged 6 to 9 have never attended school (DHS Final Report, 2003).

Despite official regulations, children in Nigeria enrol in school at various different ages. To illustrate this phenomenon, I select children in school born between 1989 and 1994 (i.e. children who were due to start school before the introduction of the Sharia) and plot the distribution of the ages at which they started school in figure 5. The solid graph relates to children residing in Sharia states, the dashed to children in the rest of the country. In both samples, less than a quarter of children, who enrol in school, do so at the age of six. Almost 40% start school before that age and around a third begin school aged 7 or older. To take account of the aforementioned variation in the age at which children start school together with the legal requirement to start school at the age of six, I define the dependent variable as taking the value 1 if a child entered school between the ages of 4 to 6. For children due to enter school before the introduction of the Sharia, 43% of children entered school between 4 and 6 years old.

The difference in differences estimates in panel C of table 2 indicate that in states that introduced the Sharia, the probability of school enrolment (aged 6 or younger) increased after the Sharia by 8 to 10 percentage points. As before, the effect is robust to various specifications (columns 1 to 3). In contrast to this, the probability of school enrolment before the age of 6 hardly changed in the rest of the country after the introduction of the Sharia. The triple differences estimates in column 5 suggest that the Sharia increased the probability of children enrolling in school between the ages 4 and 6 by around 15 percentage points. For the partitioned ethnicities sample, the parameter estimates are slightly larger, 22 percentage points.

Finally, I use information on the exact year of birth of children (as always adjusted for the September cut off) to investigate whether changes in school enrolment occurred for children due to enter in the school year 2000/01. As before, I estimate the event study 17 framework outlined in equation 6. The baseline sample in this case consists of children born in the school year 1989/90, i.e. children due to start school between 1993/94 and 1995/96, depending on whether they started school aged 4, 5 or 6. The results in panel a of figure 6 report the estimates for states that introduced the Sharia. For this sample, conditional differences between Muslims and Christians for children due to enter school before the introduction of the Sharia are similar to the base year. The estimates for γθ fluctuate around 0 and are not statistically significant. By contrast, for children due to enter school after the school year 2000/01, the point estimates increase in size and become statistically significant. Panel b shows that for the remainder of the country, the conditional differences between Muslims and Christians remain similar to the baseline year throughout the time period under consideration.

Columns 3 and 4 of table 3 show that the impact of the Sharia on primary school enrolment was slightly larger for girls than for boys. The parameter estimate for boys is around 12 percentage points (column 3). The corresponding figure for girls is around 22 percentage points (column 4). A possible explanation for this heterogeneity is connected with the pretreatment means reported towards the top of table 3. For children due to enter school before the introduction of the Sharia, the proportion of boys entering school aged 4 to 6 was slightly higher than for girls (0.46 for the former and 0.39 for the latter). The Sharia explicitly states that young boys and girls should be treated equally. Parents following these rules should enrol boys and girls at the same rates. Combined with pre-existing disadvantages for girls this change in behaviour would lead to a stronger effect for girls than for boys.