HIV is highly stigmatized in sub-Saharan Africa. This is an important public health problem because HIV stigma has many adverse effects that threaten to undermine efforts to control the HIV epidemic.

The implementation of a universal primary education policy in Uganda in 1997 provided us with a natural experiment to test the hypothesis that education is causally related to HIV stigma.

For this analysis, we pooled publicly available, population-based data from the 2011 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey and the 2011 Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey. The primary outcomes of interest were negative attitudes toward persons with HIV, elicited using four questions about anticipated stigma and social distance.

Standard least squares estimates suggested a statistically significant, negative association between years of schooling and HIV stigma (each P<0.001, with t-statistics ranging from 4.9 to 14.7). We then used a natural experiment design, exploiting differences in birth cohort exposure to universal primary education as an instrumental variable. Participants who were <13 years old at the time of the policy change had 1.36 additional years of schooling compared to those who were ≥13 years old. Adjusting for linear age trends before and after the discontinuity, two-stage least squares estimates suggested no statistically significant causal effect of education on HIV stigma (P-values ranged from 0.21 to 0.69). Three of the four estimated regression coefficients were positive, and in all cases the lower confidence limits convincingly excluded the possibility of large negative effect sizes. These instrumental variables estimates have a causal interpretation and were not overturned by several robustness checks.

We conclude that, for young adults in Uganda, additional years of education in the formal schooling system driven by a universal primary school intervention have not had a causal effect on reducing negative attitudes toward persons with HIV.