OBJECTIVES. As of 2015, there were 1.6 billion women of reproductive age (15-49) in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), with adolescents (defined as age 10-19) representing 16%. The Sustainable Development Goals call for disproportionate focus on adolescent family planning. The family planning community has targeted adolescents under the assumption that there are disproportionate economic and health impacts of interventions for the youth. In high income countries, younger age at first birth is associated with lower lifetime educational attainment. Although often cited as a reason for targeting young women, this association may not be generalizable to LMIC for cultural and contextual reasons, nor has it been demonstrated empirically. We aimed to compare the timing of education completion relative to first birth for mothers in LMIC to assess the feasibility of a causal association.

METHODS. We used the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Rwanda (2014, n=13,947) and Nigeria (2013, n=38,948). We examined the age of the women at first birth relative to the age at final year of education, stratified by the 5-year age group at first birth, and adjusted for urban/rural.

RESULTS. We found that 13.3%/3.4% urban/rural (Rwanda) and 12.5%/9.7% urban/rural (Nigeria) of women in the <15 age at first birth category, and 8.4%/1.8% urban/rural (Rwanda) and 22.6%/8.0% urban/rural (Nigeria) in the 15-19 age at first birth category, stopped education within 1 year of the first birth. The majority stopped education more than 1-year before first birth.

CONCLUSIONS. These results suggested that a small proportion of women end school at the time of first birth, with the exception of urban women age 15-19 in Nigeria, indicating that pregnancy was not the primary reason for limiting education. Increasing contraceptive use to delay age at first birth is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on educational attainment in LMIC.