Dry weather, empty desks? Rainfall Shocks and Child Education in Tanzania

Frequent and intense rainfall shocks pose a serious threat to educational attainment in agrarian economies, yet the pathways through which these shocks operate remain underexplored. Using nationally representative panel data from the Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) and high-resolution rainfall measures from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS)), we estimate the effects of extreme droughts and floods on children’s schooling in Tanzania. Exploiting variation in rainfall deciles, we show that extreme low-rainfall events below the 10th percentile lead to a roughly 10 percentage points decline in school enrollment, while moderate deviations have no significant impact. Severe drought effects persist across specifications with household and individual fixed effects and are especially large for adolescents (13–17 years) and girls, who face declines in enrollment of up to 19 percentage points. We find that droughts sharply increase household reliance on family labor, adding nearly 36 days per year without substantially altering hired-labor inputs or children’s involvement in farm work. Continuous rainfall measures (total rainfall and lagged rainfall) further corroborate that incremental increases in precipitation significantly boost both plot-level yields and village-level vegetation indices. We offer new evidence on the timing, heterogeneity, and channels through which climate variability undermines educational investment in Sub-Saharan Africa and underscores the urgency of integrated policy responses that bolster both agricultural resilience and school access.