No Rain No Gain – How Reduced Rainfall Impacts on Children’s School Attendance in Uganda

The increasing frequency of negative rainfall shocks presents households with a challenge of whether to send their children to school or withdraw them, in order to provide shock-coping support in the household. We use high-resolution spatial rainfall data matched with geo-referenced Uganda National Panel Survey data to estimate the effect of negative rainfall shocks on children’s school attendance. We find that exposure to negative rainfall shocks reduces children’s school attendance by almost 10%. These results have important policy implications for improving children’s schooling in Uganda, particularly in geographical areas that receive highly erratic levels of rainfall