Since the 1980s the demographic literature has suggested that maternal schooling plays a key role in determining children’s survival chances in low and middle income countries. However, no studies have successfully distinguished between the causal and non-causal relationship between maternal education and child mortality and overcome the endogeneity problems inherent in this relationship. In order to identify the causal effect of maternal education on child mortality we explore exogenous variation in education induced by schooling reforms in the 1990s in Malawi and Uganda. We use a two-stage residual inclusion approach and the Demographic and Health Surveys data to find that in both countries, for each additional year and level of maternal education, children have a lower probability of dying. However, the estimates of the causal negative effect are not statistically significant; the lower quality of the education introduced by the reforms may explain the lack of a significant effect.