NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Growth Based Development and the Sustainability of Educational Access: Prospects for Ghana
By Caine Rolleston, London Institute of Education
Email: C.Rolleston@ioe.ac.ukKeywords
Ghana, Educational Access, Sustainability
Summary
This article examines the sustainability of educational access in Ghana. It argues that it is the patterns of differential impact in terms of the benefits of growth and demand for education which present the greatest challenges for sustainable development of educational access.
Ghana is often regarded as one of the post-structural adjustment success stories of sub-Saharan Africa, both in terms of economic reform and educational provision. Growth has been steady since the 1980s, educational expansion rapid and broadly sustained, and poverty reduction in absolute terms tangible. Moreover, Ghana is one of few sub-Saharan African countries in which the ?Education for All? targets may be in view by 2015. These stylized facts naturally belie considerable intra-national variation; and it is arguably the patterns of differential impact in terms of the benefits of growth and demand for education which present the greatest challenges for sustainable development of educational access.
Although sustained, growth in Ghana through the 1990s and thereafter has been to a large extent of the ?jobless? variety; characterized by a shift in the labour market away from relatively well paid public sector employment in favour of typically lower paying informal economic activity (Rolleston and Oketch 2008). In 1999, 13.8 per cent of the workforce was employed where the returns to education are highest - in the formal wage sector (GSS 2000); a figure barely distinguishable from the 13.7 per cent reported in Philip Foster?s seminal work of the 1960s. Moreover, studies of manufacturing industry find no general increase in productivity or technical efficiency over the period since 1991 (Rankin et al 2002). Despite potentially falling benefits, participation in education has grown substantially. Only Uganda had a higher ratio of school enrolment expansion to wage employment growth in the 1990s than Ghana?s figure of 16 to 1. Not coincidentally perhaps, both countries experienced a period of strengthening democracy, doubtless a partial motivator for national administrations to make and deliver on pledges with widely shared benefits, including UPE. Rapidly expanding supply met with well-documented difficulties in Uganda, most notably concerning quality with obvious implications for the sustainability of access gains. When the poorest groups in Ghana are considered, however, despite reductions in certain cost barriers, there is surprisingly little evidence of access expansion at all in the period since 1991.
Net primary school enrolment rates in the lowest standard of living quintile in Ghana were 73 per cent for boys and 70 per cent for girls in 1998/9 and 69 per cent and 70 per cent respectively in 2005/6. Net secondary enrolment rates were 28 per cent for boys and 22 per cent for girls in the lowest quintile in 1998/9 and 22 per cent and 21 per cent in 2005/6 (GSS 2007). Economic growth since 1991 has been arguably no longer pro-poor. The average consumption level of poor households was 36 per cent below the poverty line in 1991/2, 35 per cent below in 1998/9 and 34 per cent below in 2005/6. Indeed, decomposition of poverty trends shows that the benefits of growth for the poor have been reduced by countervailing redistributive effects acting in favour of the non-poor. A parallel may be drawn in terms of schooling - for the richest quintile, enrolment in secondary schooling has risen from 41 per cent for girls and 49 per cent for boys in 1991/2 to 62 per cent and 55 per cent respectively in 2005-6.
Economic growth is increasingly and justifiably acknowledged as central to poverty reduction, not least in DFID?s recently launched 2008-13 Research Strategy, where it appears as the foremost theme. Educational development both contributes to growth and results from it but at the same time is not neutral with regard to growth modalities and trajectories. Educational development which is pro-growth is likely to be that which acts in favour of employment, and enhances productivity, both of labour and the other factors of production, largely by creating skills (see Palmer et al 2007). Equally, growth which is relatively skilled-labour intensive is likely to enhance the value of and demand for education, completing a potentially virtuous circle. The extent to which growth promotes educational access, however, depends upon how the benefits of growth are distributed, particularly where the obstacles to enrolment lie on the demand-side. Among the poorest in Ghana at least, relative exclusion from the benefits of growth and education not only threaten the sustainability of progress towards and the achievement of EFA, but also risk entrenching exclusion yet further as higher standard of living groups continue to make gains in terms of educational achievement, widening the gap and thereby ?kicking away? the educational ladder.
References
Ghana Statistical Service [GSS] (2000) Ghana Living Standards Survey ? Report of the Fourth Round (GLSS4) GSS, Accra
Ghana Statistical Service [GSS] (2007) Patterns and Trends of Poverty in Ghana GSS, Accra
Palmer, R., R. Wedgwood and Rachel Hayman with Kenneth King and Neil Thin (2007) Educating out of Poverty? A Synthesis Report on Ghana, India, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa, DFID Educational Papers 70.
Rolleston, C. and M. Oketch (2008) ?Educational expansion in Ghana: Economic assumptions and expectations?. International Journal of Educational Development 28(3): 320-339
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