Education and labour market dynamics in a period of rapid education expansion

Building evidence from existing Ghanaian survey data sources

Recognising the need for policies that address poverty and inequality, and build social cohesion, the Ghanaian government rolled out free compulsory primary education in 1996 and free senior high school provision in 2017. With the first cohorts exposed to the free education policies now reaching prime adulthood, our project aimed to take stock of how educational attainment has changed over time, and to examine the gendered consequences of these education changes for labour market dynamics and intergenerational socioeconomic mobility.

Our overarching research question was ‘What are the education, labour market, and intergenerational socioeconomic consequences associated with the expansion of education access in Ghana, and how do they differ for men and women?’ Our work programme was designed around three core activities: a data, research, and training contribution.

Data contributions

1. Stacked and harmonised cross-sectional data

Drawing on SALDRU’s learnings from stacking Statistics South Africa survey data in the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, we will stacked the Ghana Living Standards Surveys and Population and Housing Census data to create the 'Ghana Education and Labour Series' (GELS), a high frequency database of information on education, jobs, gender, and labour market activities.

2. Panel data contribution

Individual panel data allows an investigation of the mobility of individual socioeconomic outcomes over time. Recognising this, Ghana established the of Ghanaian Socioeconomic Panel Survey (GSPS) in 2009. The current version of the GSPS data is, however, not readily configured for the types of analyses that use panel data. An important output of our project was the creation of harmonised individual and household files for each wave, as well as long and wide versions of the person-level panel. These are supported by reproducible Stata code, crosswalks showing how variables relate across waves, records of corrections and automated quality checks.

Research contributions

Four primary research outputs (see below) examine different aspects of what happens when access to education expands. Rather than focusing only on enrolment or average years of schooling, they consider whether educational opportunities became more equal across generations, where people subsequently worked and what type of work they did, how young people moved through education and into work or inactivity, and whether education was associated with benefits beyond the labour market.

Training contribution

We identified a need and demand for training in longitudinal data management and analysis from researchers across the continent. A key output was a week-long training course in Ghana in 2025, with the content designed around the use of the GSPS data. The course will be repeated in Cape Town in November 2026.

This project was funded by the Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries Programme for the period October 2023 – August 2026. The research was a collaboration between SALDRU’s Siyaphambili Post-school Research Initiative and researchers from the South Africa and Ghana nodes of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR). Siyaphambili’s Nicola Branson and Vimal Ranchhod are co-PIs alongside Robert Osei from the ACEIR Ghana node, University of Ghana.