Objective: To examine the progress in their schooling of maternal and paternal orphans
in a province of South Africa with high AIDS mortality and contrast it with that of both
children who lived in different households from their parents and children who resided
with their parents.
Methods: The KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study is a panel of households first
interviewed in 1993. The 1998 and 2004 waves of fieldwork collected 5477 reports on
children aged 8–20 years. We studied the determinants of the proportion of these
children who had completed 2þ grades fewer than expected for their year of birth using
both household fixed-effects models and difference-in-difference models fitted to
children reported on twice.
Results: Co-residence with a well-educated mother benefited children’s schooling, but
the fixed-effects models provide no evidence that maternal orphanhood or living apart
from their mother adversely affected children’s schooling. In contrast, both paternal
orphanhood and belonging to a different household from one’s father resulted in slower
progress at school. Although absence of the father was associated with household
poverty, this was not why it was associated with falling behind at school.
Discussion: Both the substantial benefits of living with their fathers for children’s
schooling and the limited importance of maternal orphanhood conflict with the results
of most studies in this issue, including those of other research in the same part of South
Africa. These findings caution against drawing general conclusions about the impact of
the AIDS epidemic from a few studies of geographically localized populations.