Browse Publications
Discover and manage thousands of titles across multiple genres, scientific journals, and classic literature.
Duration of high school education on early fertility and marriage: evidence from a policy change in Ghana
By Emmanuel Adu Boahen
Purpose: The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of spending one extra year in high school on early marriage and childbirth. Design/methodology/approach: The study takes advantage of the education reform in 2007 that extended the years of high school education by one to conduct a quasi experiment. The marriage and fertility outcomes of women who completed a four-year senior high school education are compared to those who completed a three-year senior high school education. Findings: The findings from the study indicate that the one-year extension in high school education led to a 4.75 percentage point reduction in the probability of ever marrying by age 27 and a 6.7 percentage point reduction in the probability of ever given birth. The authors demonstrate that the extension of the duration of high school education by one year has a heterogeneous effect, as it reduced the fertility and marriage outcomes of rural girls more than urban girls. The study reveals opportunity costs and confinement effects as possible mechanisms through which the policy affected early marriage and birth. Originality/value: This study is one of the few studies that examine the impact of the duration of secondary school education on fertility and marriage. For Africa in particular, there is no such study. Thus, this study provides a unique contribution to the literature since available studies on this subject matter can only be found in advanced economies. Unlike other studies in Africa that use a design that provides the combined effect of duration of schooling and school enrolment on fertility and marriage, this design enables the authors to only look at the effect of duration of schooling on fertility and marriage. Peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0323. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
Household Multidimensional Energy Poverty: Impact on Health, Education, and Cognitive Skills of Children in Ghana
By Elizabeth Nsenkyire
Energy poverty in Sub-Saharan African countries continues to be of global concern. Its grave implications for the achievement of the sustainable development goal 7 (SDG 7) by 2030, validate this concern. Current studies, therefore, focus on analyzing the impact of energy poverty on child well-being, thus, their health, education, and cognitive skills. Despite this, studies in Sub-Saharan African countries where the highest energy poverty rates are remains scanty. Hence, using data from the current wave of the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS 7), this paper analyzes multidimensional energy poverty and its impact on the health, education, and cognitive skills of children in Ghana. The multidimensional energy poverty analysis reveals that nearly 59% of children in Ghana are living in multidimensional energy-poor households. Further, the structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses show that a standard deviation increase in multidimensional energy poverty reduces child health, education, and cognitive skills by 0.155, 0.13, and 0.402 standard deviation respectively. The government through the Ministry of Energy and allied agencies and departments must commit to making modern energy accessible and affordable throughout the country to mitigate the negative impact of multidimensional energy poverty on child well-being. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
© 2026 AERD Database System. All Rights Reserved. Developed by Strategic Technologies.