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Estimating the Impact of School Education on Contraception Use among Adolescents Aged 15–19 in Burkina Faso and Nigeria: Evidence from a Heckman Two-Step Correction Model

Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) still raise serious concerns for adolescents’ sexual health in west-Africandeveloping countries. To this extent, promoting contraception use among sexually active adolescents is a major key to addressing this problem. Yet, the rate of contraception use by adolescents remains surprisingly low in these countries. Using the Demographic Health Survey of Burkina Faso (2014) and Nigeria (2013), this paper examines the influence of school education on contraception use among sexually active male and femaleadolescents aged 15-19 in Burkina Faso and Nigeria. The standard estimates using Probit regressions suggestthat achieving a primary school education increases the probability of a sexually active adolescent to usecontraception by 8.26 percentage points (Burkina Faso) and 17.2 percentage points (Nigeria). This effectincreases to 20.3 percentage points (Burkina Faso) and 34.7 percentage points (Nigeria) for adolescents with asecondary or higher school education. However, these baseline estimates are biased because adolescents’decision to engage into sexual activity is not random. In light of this, a Heckman Correction Model (HCM) hasbeen applied to account for this selection bias. The results show that the Probit regressions underestimate theeffect of education on adolescents’ likelihood to use contraception in Burkina Faso and overestimate this effect in Nigeria. In fact, compared to adolescents with no school education, HCM estimates show that adolescentswith primary and secondary (or higher) school education have respectively 10.2 and 24.4 percentage points morein the use of contraception in Burkina Faso and 15.1 and 34 percentage points in Nigeria. Together, these resultssuggest that the exposure to school education increases contraception use among the adolescents in both BurkinaFaso and Nigeria.