Previous studies have examined the relationship between education and non-marital pregnancy
and between education and teen-pregnancy focusing mainly on how non-marital or teenage
pregnancy affects individual human capital and also only rarely considering the intersection of
the two groups—and have mainly considered developed countries, especially the US.
This paper examines non-marital teenage pregnancy in Ghana, focusing on the role and
interplay of Ghanaian and English reading skills, formal educational attainment, and adult
literacy course participation. Pursuing first an instrumental variables strategy, using year of birth
and region of birth interactions as identifying instruments, indicates that skills and schooling may
be treated as predetermined to whether an unmarried teenage girl has experienced a pregnancy.
Continuing, therefore, with linear probability models yields three main results. First, I confirm
the finding from previous studies that educational attainment is negatively associated with either
non-marital or teenage pregnancy. Second, however, once Ghanaian and English reading skills
are introduced, the association between educational attainment and non-marital teenage
pregnancy decreases or disappears altogether. Third, for the teenage girls who have not
completed primary school, adult literacy course participation is associated with a much lower
probability of experiencing a teenage pregnancy.