This paper analyzes the relationships between HIV-AIDS and education taking into account the appropriative nature of child income. We rst build a simple theoretical model linking parental health risk, educational choice and appropriation of future children's income. We show that considering (remittances from) child's income as an insurance asset can reverse the relationship between illness prevalence and educational investment, which may then become positive. This prediction is tested on data compiled from the DHS database for 17 SSA countries between the years 2003 to 2010 for children aged between 6 and 22 inclusive. To take into account the hierarchical nature of the data we employ a multilevel analysis. We nd that in general the impact of household HIV status on educational enrollment at a point in time is negative while the eect of community HIV prevalence is insignicant. But once the data is split to account for possible dierences in appropriation, the eect of community prevalence of becomes positive and sometimes signicant for highly appropriable groups (rural, girls), while remaining either negative or insignicant for the rest.