The Impact of the Family Kinship Structure and Maternal Empowerment on the Education of Daughters in Malawi

This research examines the theoretical and empirical relationship between women's power and children's years of schooling in Malawi using the Integrated Household Panel Survey (IHPS-2010-2013-2016). To investigate the trade-off between schooling and domestic productivity, we build a model of household decision-making that takes into account the type of customary law (of the family) as well as parents' preferences about the gender of their children. We develop a female power index (FPI), which measures each woman's intra-household decision-making within her family, and then test-empirically- the theoretical results through a random effects estimation. Our findings imply that women's power improves daughters' education, and that the education level differs according to the family's kinship structure. In fact, in a matrilineal system, if the mother has more power, the daughter gets more in terms of years of education, but in patrilineal systems a woman's authority alone is not sufficient to reach the same results. Keywords: Female Power; Kinship System; Children's Education; Africa.