EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Inequality of education in colonial Ghana: European influences and African responses

Prince Young Aboagye

Economic History of Developing Regions, 2021, vol. 36, issue 3, 367-391

Abstract: How and why did African households under colonial rule make the decision to educate their children or not, and how did this micro-level decision making affect the diffusion of education in colonial Ghana? This paper addresses these questions and shows that many households were reluctant to enrol their children in school because the costs of colonial education were prohibitive, and the benefits were limited. Unemployment of school leavers was a major social problem throughout the colonial era and returns to education did not justify investments in education. The demand for education was relatively high in areas where the demand for skilled labour was high, and from the late 1930s when there were growing pay-offs to colonial education. Overall, the paper points to the need to examine interactions between supply and demand factors in order to understand variations in human capital accumulation in sub-Saharan Africa.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2021.1921571 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:36:y:2021:i:3:p:367-391

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rehd20

DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1921571

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History of Developing Regions is currently edited by Alex Klein and Alfonso Herranz-Loncan

More articles in Economic History of Developing Regions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:36:y:2021:i:3:p:367-391