Uganda is widely viewed as a public health success for curtailing its HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s. The period of rapid HIV decline coincided with a dramatic rise in girls' secondary school enrollment. We instrument for this enrollment with distance to school, conditional on a rich set of demographic and locational controls, including distance to market center. We find that girls' enrollment in secondary education significantly increased the likelihood of abstaining from sex. Using a triple-difference estimator, we find that some of the schooling increase among young women was in response to a 1990 affirmative action policy giving women an advantage over men on University applications.
Keywords: Education policy; Gender; HIV/AIDS; I15; O12.
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