The Impact of Quality Sexual Education on HIV/AIDS in Zambia: Evidence from a Natural Experience

Arlette Simo Fotso, French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED)
Sally E. Findley, Columbia University and ICAP-NY

This paper focuses on the manner in which quality sexual education is associated with HIV-related knowledge, stigma and risky sexual behaviour in Zambians. The implementation of the Comprehensive Sexuality Education program (CSE) since 2014 from grades 5 to 12 provides a natural experiment. Data are drawn from the recent and original 2016 Zambian Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment survey (ZAMPHIA). Two-way fixed-effects double difference and triple difference approaches are used to test our hypothesis. We found that quality of sex education reduced the number of risky sexual behaviours among those who received the CSE curriculum by 0.28, while as expected it was associated with a higher probability to abstained from sex (0.15 points) and a greater number of correct HIV-related knowledge (0.42 points). No significant association was found between quality of sex education and HIV-related stigma. These results point to the importance of investing in high quality sexual education to combat the HIV-AIDS progression.