Effects of education on Sub Saharan Africa

Abstract

When Africa strives to provide primary education for all, recent research wonders about the trade-off between more resources allocated to primary education and higher education on Africa’s economic growth. Africa's skills gap is a key concern and poses a real threat to Africa's industrial development and eventually its growth. Previous research has stressed that higher education is a key source of growth. Yet, it has been argued that primary education drives economic growth for less developed countries. For a sample of thirty-three Sub Saharan African countries, this paper aims to study the effect of education at all levels on economic growth, and on the growths of various sectors, mainly agriculture, industry and services for time periods spanning 5, 10 and 20-year changes. The model used is macro-Mincer equation and is estimated using OLS regression. We find that increases in primary education have a positive and significant impact on economic growth over longer time changes. We also find that the growth impact of changes in education differ across sectors. More specifically, while the increase in primary education has a positive effect on the agriculture sector, the increase in secondary and tertiary education has benefitted the manufacturing and services sector respectively. The finding implies that while primary education is the key to growth, secondary and tertiary education is what matter to the industrial development in the SSA economy.