The education gradients in adult female obesity: causal evidence from two African countries

Obesity rates are rising around the world and so are its health and socio-economic costs. In order to effectively address the problem of obesity, it is important to understand the drivers of the disease. Education is one potential determinant and while there is a large body of literature on the causal impacts of schooling on obesity status, bulk of the existing evidence comes from developed countries. In this paper, we study the education gradients in adult female obesity in two African settings – Uganda and Zimbabwe. In the past, these countries have implemented large national school reform programmes that significantly enhanced educational attainment. We leverage age-specific exposure to these reforms to instrument for women’s education and use a two stage least squares (2SLS) methodology to isolate the effects of education on later-life obesity. Despite evidence of positive and statistically significant education-obesity correlations, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that schooling has no overall causal impact on obesity in either study setting. We also find no causal effects on body mass index and being either overweight or obese. The significant cross-sectional associations between education and obesity are evidently driven by correlations between schooling and unobserved factors influencing both schooling and obesity status.