This paper provides a preliminary survey of the educational attainment of Ghana’s adult
population. It describes patterns and trends and makes some allusions to possible
associations between educational attainment and outputs and outcomes. More rigorous
investigations into causal relations will be the subject of further research.
The analysis is conducted using the Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire (CWIQ)
survey that was conducted in 2003. The CWIQ is a nationally representative household
survey covering about 49,000 households and 170,100 individuals. A shortcoming of the
CWIQ survey is that it does not contain earnings, income or expenditure modules. It is
the preferred data set, however, for this analysis because the fourth Ghana Living
Standards Survey conducted in 1998/99 may be considered old and the EMIS data set of
the Ministry of Education and Sports contains only school information.
The next section presents a brief discussion on Ghana’s education system. This is
followed by section 3, a profile of the educational attainment of the population aged 15
years and above. Section 4 contains a descriptive analysis of educational attainment and
some output and outcome indicators. In particular the section will examine adult literacy,
employment, unemployment and health. Section 5 concludes the paper.