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Tremendous strides have been made recently in increasing childrens' schooling in developing countries by addressing endemic challenges such as lack of school infrastructure, human resource and high tuition costs that bar children from enrolling and attending school. However, increasing climate change induced weather shocks affecting household income present parents with a remarkle decision puzzle of wether to send their children to school or withdraw them to provide shock coping support at home. The usual household shock coping strategies such as reduction in consumption, increase in adult off-farm labour supply which then increases the demand for childrens' labour on-farm affect childrens' welfare. We use a high resolution spatial rainfall data from the Rainfall Estimates (RFE 2.0) database of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA) matched with the georeferenced 2009/10 and 2011/12 waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS) to estimate the effect of negative rainfall shock on childrens' school attendance, using a fixed effect model. We find that prolonged negative rainfall leads to a significant reduction in childrens' school attendance by 0.9%. There are also significant gendered effects, for example we find that girls' school attendance is upto 7.6% lower than boys. These results have important policy implications for improving the schooling of children in areas that have endemic erratic rainfalls in Uganda.
