Literacy and numeracy skills as development indicators in Ghana

¶ … Ghana

Blunch and Verner (Determinants of Literacy)

How does a country make progress? The answers seem to be obvious on paper - if difficult to effect in the world itself. Those of us who are citizens of the First World tend to believe that we understand what is required for a nation to "develop." But Blunch and Verner, in their study of literacy and numeracy skills in Ghana, demonstrate how complicated the idea of "development" is and how culturally specific.

That development should take different courses in different parts of the world should, in fact, not be a surprise to us at all. One of the problems of modernization projects has always been that there is a certain essential arrogance to nearly all of them because there is embedded in them the idea that every "backward" country could improve itself (i.e. become like the nation that is sponsoring the modernization project) if it simply applied itself.

Such an arrogance is not, in fact, restricted to the United States or the Western European nations; it was at least as marked an aspect of Marxist regimes that argued that every nation would progress through feudalism and capitalism in the same trajectory.

However, if the process of making progress were truly as simple as all of that, one might hazard a guess that nations would be more developed than they are. While the idea of development may be a Western one, with a number of cultural biases woven into it, it is also hard not to imagine that many governments do in fact desire many of the things that development can bring with it - lower infant mortality rates, for example.

This article looks at two of the measures that are traditionally used by First World nations and a variety of non-governmental organizations such as the United Nations and the Red Cross to determine how much a country is developing: literacy and numeracy amongst the population.

The authors argue that these are essential criteria to examine when considering the current economic and cultural situation in Ghana because they afford fairly concise ways of determining what skills are possessed by members of the population that might be of greatest use to those people in their lives.

Education is generally seen as a uniformly positive force both in overall improvement of a nation's economic position (and one might indeed posit that the current economic stagnation in sub-Saharan African arises from the fact that the population in this area is in general formally uneducated), but the authors of this study suggest that simply assuming correlating an amorphous value of "education" with improved economic chances does not provide us with a sufficiently precise analytical tool by which to assess a population.

This paper attempts to provide a precise, quantitative method to determine exactly how educated different subpopulations are in Ghana in certain sets of specific educational skills and how these measures may be used to suggest future allocations of public resources that might be employed to increase the level of education in the nation.

One of the important issues taken up in this paper is the entire question of literacy and how it should be embedded in a cultural context. Those who have grown up in the First World tend to assume that literacy is essential to being educated, and indeed it is hard to disagree with this assessment for First World citizens. Being illiterate in the First World places one in a position of significantly lessened potential economic and social power.

Moreover, being an illiterate in, for example, the United States, not only substantially limits the kinds of jobs that one can get (for example), it places one almost beyond the pale of the definition of human, in the same way that children who are so neglected and abused that they never learn to speak are also seem as somehow not quite fully human. This accounts for the reason why those who are illiterate in the First World feel such shame over their condition.

But literacy in Ghana, the authors argue, must be understood within an African context that emphasizes the importance of oral culture - the transmission of culture and knowledge through spoken rather than written language. While there are certainly limitations to an oral culture, there are also certainly many advantages to it as well (including perhaps most importantly the way that oral transmission of culture tends to create stronger community bonds and more peaceful ways of settling intra-community struggles).

Ghanaians, as members of a traditionally oral culture, may not become literate at the same rate with the same educational expenditures that another population would. Another way of putting this is that access to education (if that education has embedded in it cultural values that are not consonant with those of the population) may well fail to achieve the original goals of that educational program. This is a reiteration of the point made at the beginning of this case analysis: Progress must be defined, understood and implemented in a culturally sensitive and culturally specific way.

Education in Ghana - if we define education here to mean the acquisition of the skills required to read and write simple texts and mathematical equations - must be understood within a cultural context, and any failings of the educational system (as defined either by the government or by the people themselves) must be remedied by actions that are also culturally sensitive and specific.

The authors of the study found that there were significant differentials amongst different subpopulations in Ghana in terms of literacy and numeracy skills that reflected larger social and cultural divisions within the society. The study was an attempt to answer some of the following questions:

In particular, has the quality of schooling, as measured by literacy and numeracy, increased as a consequence of increased educational expenditures?...Has access to education, as measured by literacy and numeracy, increased or decreased over time? Is it equally distributed across rural and urban areas? Across gender? If not, we may ask: why is this?

Blunch and Verner in fact found that there were significant differences that must be seen to reflect no differences between, for example, men and women in terms of intelligence, but existing cultural and social hierarchies.

These differentials in literacy especially are of vital concern to the Ghanaian population for a number of different reasons, including economic development. But the ability to read includes more than simply the ability to get a better job: Indeed, for those pursuing traditional occupations such as farming literacy and numeracy may not be of immediate, substantial economic help (although in some cases they might).

However, there are other benefits to literacy, such as public health ones, that have both an immediate effect on a population as well as trickle-down economic ones. A person who becomes infected with AIDS because he or she cannot read health information will still be able to work for a while, but eventually will be so sick that he or she must drop out of the workforce.

Blunch and Vermer summarize this point:

Summing up the discussion in this sub-section, it seems fair to conclude that with such distinct links and spill-over effects among literacy/cognitive skills and health and labor market outcomes, the usefulness of analyzing further the origins and determinants of literacy and cognitive skills in order to promote growth of these skills becomes evident. Indeed, pointing to the AIDS-epidemic in large part of Sub-Saharan Africa, increasing our understanding of the literacy-health link and promoting literacy throughout the continent is imperative.

The differentials that the researchers discovered in regards to literacy and numeracy skills are in fact exactly what one might expect. Literacy and numeracy are positively correlated with age: Each additional year that a person has lived increases the probability of being literate by between 1.8 and 2.4%.

Males are more likely to be literate than are female, the researchers found by a significant degree, suggestive of structural biases in the educational system. The educational level of fathers, but not mothers, is important as well. And urban dwellers far more than rural ones are likely to be literate.

Finally, the two researchers found that a person's general cultural background was an important element in acquiring literacy and numeracy skills.

Case Study Two: Blunch and Verner (Functional Literacy)

One of the assumptions made about education in the First World is that people will be either impelled or lured by economic factors into becoming literate. There are few jobs in the United States, for example, in which literacy is not important and almost none that are not minimum-wage positions. (Certainly there are a few: One might become a millionaire by being a model or an athlete if one were not literate and had a talented, honest agent, but the chances of being able to achieve this are, of course, very low.)

However, this may not be the case in all countries simply because the amount of education required for a good job is likely to vary substantially depending upon the economic base of the country.

These are some of the issues brought up by this study of functional literacy in Ghana by Blunch and Verner, who analyzed literacy patterns in the nation and found a number of important, if to a large measure predictable patterns.

The two researchers found that the most important demographic factors correlated with literacy are age, gender, the educational background of one's family (in particular one's father), personal and family income and the distance to the nearest school.

This last is something that citizens of the First World might not automatically remember to consider because schools are so close to nearly every citizen in a nation like the United States.

However, in poorer nations, schools are more widely spaced, especially in rural areas. For poor families, the distance between their home and a school may be the deciding factor in whether or not a child receives an education. This seems to be especially true - Blunch and Verner find - if the child is a girl, for whom education and in particular literacy seem to be less culturally valued - and if the educational background of the parents is low.

It should be noted that we see at least something of this same psychological stance in the developed world: One of the best predictors of whether a child will attend college in the United States is whether that child's parents also attended college. Those with an education tend to understand both the value and the simple pleasures of that education while those without a high degree of formal education are inclined to believe that if they have been able to make their way in the world without it then their children will also be able to succeed without education.

It is important to understand that this is not simply some artifact of the Third World but rather something that seems to be universal to human psychology. The way in which one might remedy a problem that only obtains in a developing nation is rather different from the ways in which one goes about trying to "fix" something that is at least a tendency throughout the human population.

This article has two especially important findings. The first of these is that - beyond a certain point (as noted in the findings of the article critiqued in the first case study) age is negatively correlated with literacy.

The researchers stress that literacy can be defined in a number of ways. This idea is explored in this explanation:

All definitions presented earlier assume that, to be considered "literate," a person has to be able to cope with some reading and/or writing tasks. Yet, what level or type of reading and writing skills are needed?

Existing definitions of literacy differ in several ways. For example, some imply that literacy is static or absolute; once you are able to sign your name, or finish a certain grade level, you are considered "literate." Other definitions (which are now accepted by most educators and organizations) view literacy as dynamic or relative; they assume literacy should be defined only within a certain context of functioning, which may change from one country/culture to another, or over time. Some definitions also include as part of literacy other mental skills, such as numeracy and problem solving.

The bottom line is that literacy is not a simple concept with a single, accepted meaning.

Although Blunch and Verner tend to use the UNESCO definition of literacy as a baseline, they are more inclined to use a situationally and culturally-based definition as suggested by the above brief examination of the issue.

Using such an appropriately broad and flexible definition of literacy, the two found the above-noted negative correlation between age and literacy In other words, while the average adult is more likely to be literate than the average infant (of course) the average 20-year-old is not likely to be more literate than the average 16-year-old.

This suggests to the researchers that individuals do not continue their education beyond a certain basic point because there is not sufficient economic pay-off for them to do so (coupled with the difficulty of continuing an education, especially in rural areas). However, the two rightly argue that it cannot simply be the fact that it is difficult to get an education that prevents Ghanaians from furthering their exposure to formal learning.

Education is difficult for many people to acquire. But people are also engaged in furthering their education all over the world because they find themselves without the skills (without more education) to support themselves and their families.

This is the first important finding of this research.

The second important finding is that basic literacy is in fact required to enter into the job market in Ghana for most people. This means that most people do in fact acquire at least a functional level of literacy. It should be noted that literacy and economic development levels are of course related to each other; however, this relationship (as the researchers suggest may well be the case in Ghana) may not be a dynamic one.

What this means in the case of Ghana is that most people require a basic level of literacy to get jobs. As is true of most populations, the people of Ghana have a relatively accurate idea of just how much education they need to be employable, and they acquire this level of education and then, with the requisite skills, enter the job market.

Once they are in the job market, they tend not to continue their education nor, it is suggested in the statistics gathered in this report, do their employers or the government offer incentives to get people to continue their education beyond the minimum that they need to get into the job market to begin with.

This must be seen as a problematic pattern both on the personal and on the national level. Those jobs that require basic literacy are certainly vital to a nation - farming, for example, requires knowledge and experience but not an exceptionally high degree of literacy. However, many of the jobs necessary to help improve the overall standard of living in a nation (including public-health workers, engineers, teachers, lawyers, and researchers) require a much higher degree of education.

If Ghanaians drop out of the educational system as soon as they have sufficient skills to acquire the jobs that require the lowest levels of education and do not return later to increase their education, then individuals will find themselves employed for life in relatively low-paying jobs that will not generate the wealth that families need to educate future generations, buy land or equipment, etc.

Moreover, the nation as a whole will be unable to develop certain kinds of industries and endeavors - such as genetic research or a space program - without highly skilled workers. Without the development of such high-tech sectors of the economy, workers will continue to have available to them only low-paying, low-skilled work, so they will continue to seek out only the most basic levels of education, which will further limit the economic progress of the nation, which will further limit the incentives for any individual to seek out education - exacerbating a cycle that benefits neither individuals nor the nation as a whole.

The best way to break this cycle, the researchers suggest, is to make it easier to attend schools, thus breaking this cycle at the beginning and to target educational programs at those most in need of them - the rural female poor.

Case Study Three: Betts' "Returns to Quality"

Julian Betts' study for the World Bank on how much education pays off in a purely economic sense, like the two studies by Blunch and Verner already assessed, help us to examine in a rigorous, analytical way the ways in which education is connected to both personal and national development. All three of these studies help us to go beyond the fuzzy if appealing "All education is good" standard that we might be inclined to apply to a deeper and more critical understanding of the ways in which particular modes of education can and do (or do not) benefit particular parts of the population.

Betts frames his overall question like this:

The strong and positive link between years of schooling and earnings of students once they enter the labor market is by now one of the best established facts in labor economics. A recent review of research by Psacharopolous (1994) establishes that an additional year of schooling has larger effects on earnings for workers in developing countries, and that within developing countries the returns to education decline with the level of schooling. In light of the observed returns to an extra year of schooling, the imposition of compulsory school attendance laws in both developed and developing countries during the last 100 years and the associated expenditures are widely viewed as an excellent public investment.

This is a valid, indeed even an essential question for all nations and all governments to ask themselves, for the amount of funding available to any government for public programs is limited. However, these limitations are substantially greater for poorer nations like Ghana, which must therefore make as careful calculations as possible over how best to allocate public funding.

Betts's findings are directed primarily to First World nations. In the case of a country like the United States, he suggests, the pay-back for education in economic terms is not as high as one might guess (or wish):

Betts (1996a) calculates the internal rate of return to increased school spending and to increasing the teacher-pupil ratio. The calculations suggest that the internal rate of return is on the order of 0.55 to 2.55% for spending per pupil. Using the teacher-pupil ratio, the state-level estimates suggest an internal rate of return of 1.45 to 2.35%. However, the internal rate of return, based on the overall estimated impact of the teacher-pupil ratio from estimates at all levels of aggregation, is not defined, meaning that even at a zero rate of discount expenditures designed to boost the teacher-pupil ratio are never recovered through subsequent wage gains for students. Even the highest of these rates of return is very low relative to the real interest rate. It is important to understand that this finding suggests that the returns to increased school resources in the United States are small, given the way in which school currently spend education dollars. It does not guarantee that more effective ways of spending cannot be found.

There are some important caveats that should be made at this point to such a finding, the most important of which is that one should always be wary of economic determinism. Education does more for a country than to allow its citizens to earn more money. Not that money isn't important; it would be the height of na vete to argue this. But it is also important not to believe that the value of every human activity can be seen in purely economic terms.

There may well be an attraction to doing so - and for at least two reasons. Money is nicely quantitative: The gross domestic product or the average hourly wage are identifiable, hard facts, the kind that researchers like when they are trying to understand the vast and shifting complexities of the human condition. It is no disservice to the name of research to say that numbers, that the kind of quantitative data that economic analysis yield - are highly useful and satisfying to researchers.

However, education should never be measured as simply a means to raise the average wage. The perils of such deterministic models are summarized below:

The term determinism denotes a doctrine which claims that all objects or events, or all objects or events of some kind (for instance, falling within the range of some scientific discipline) are determined, that is to say must be as they are and as they will be, in virtue of some laws or forces which necessitate their being so.

Determinism is in fact the name of a whole class of theories which have the above feature in common. The term becomes the name of a specific doctrine when the kind of determinism is indicated, implicitly or explicitly. The specification may indicate either the class of things that are determined, or the type of thing that does the determining, or both. For instance, economic determinism tends to mean the doctrine that economic factors determine others, historical determinism tends to mean the theory that events in history are determined, sociological determinism is likely to mean the assertion that social facts are determined, and that they are determined by social factors.

Increases in education may be measured in the "value" that they provide to an individual in the marketplace or the value that they provide to a nation composed of such individuals in the marketplace, but it must always also be measured in other ways as well - such as in decreases in crime or increases in political participation.

None of this is to say that such economic measures of the value of determination should never be made. Rather, such measures probably should be made to help determine allocation of public funding. However, they must also be placed in a broader context in which the "pay-off" for education must be seen in both economic and non-economic terms. This is especially true when assessing the value of education in poorer countries in which there will always be pressure to cut off funding from those programs that do not seem to be paying off.

Certainly, governments should carefully considering funding any project that is not providing a good return, as Betts's work suggests. But only after that government has carefully considered both economic and non-economic factors of that "return."

It is also imperative, as Betts suggests, to consider what might be termed nonlinear aspects of the pay-off for education. Increases in education spending may in fact be relatively small in a developed nation like the United States because the country already spends so much on education that the relative increase (seen in percentage terms) is too small. Educational funding may in fact be highly productive up to a certain point and then less productive after all.

However, that "certain point" may well not have been met in developing nations, where increases in education funding have both high economic and non-economic rates of return, as Betts suggests:

The developing-country literature on school spending, as surveyed by Hanushek (1995), points to the same conclusion that additional spending might be quite ineffective relative to expanding access to education. However, it seems that a greater proportion of the studies in developing countries reveal statistically significant effects of school resources on student outcomes than is true in the literature from the United States.

This does not mean that education funds must still not be carefully allocated, as Betts argues. Some education money goes farther than does other types of funding:

One recent experimental study of Kenyan... found that expenditures for textbooks and uniforms reduced drop-out rates relative to a control group of students in schools that did not participate...Since the overall change in funding for textbooks and uniforms and higher class sizes was about zero, the authors conclude that Kenyan schools could reduce drop-out rates without lowering test scores or increasing spending.

Analysis: Ghana's Current Economic State

The picture presented in the four case studies above demonstrates that while there is certainly a great deal to be optimistic about in Ghana - primarily the creativity and intelligence of its people - there is a great deal to be worried about as well for those who are concerned about the nation's economic future.

These concerns come from a number of different sectors, including education, which takes up almost one-third of the country's budget:

Ghana like most West African countries, struggles to provide its citizens with even basic educational facilities. Ghana currently spends approximately 30% of its budget on education but unfortunately that is not enough. Most large villages have affordable primary schools but junior secondary and senior secondary schools are more expensive and are geographically distant from most students. Ghana has five excellent universities both public and private with variety of programs offered. Though variety of social and economic factors limits availability to student long before the application process.

This dedication of such a high percentage of the nation's available funds to education is meant to provide - over the long-term - a chance for both individuals and the nation as a whole to rise out of poverty. However, this has at least not yet been the case:

The illiteracy rate in Ghana is over 40%, due to the restrictions of poverty and the familial necessity of child's assistance around the home or farm restrict the majority of children form attending lower level schools. The number of student who goes on to attend senior secondary school (sss) is extremely small. The male's enrollment level to senior secondary is 34.8% compare to females level at 24.0%. However the government is making efforts to push in more money in the education system, also with the help of some foreign originations.

Ghana also faces systematic problems because of international monetary policies that punish it along with other poorer countries simply for being poorer. Despite this fact, the government has recently been able to make some important economic gains, including decreasing inflation. In addition to sound domestic monetary policy, these gains have come about because the nation is blessed with a relatively high degree of natural resources.

Another way of putting this is that the country is not "naturally" poor: It has the raw materials needed to allow its citizens to live long and rewarding lives:

Ghana is well endowed with natural resources, Ghana has twice the per capital output of the poorer countries in West Africa. Even so, Ghana remains dependent on international financial and technical assistance. Gold, timber, and cocoa production are major source of foreign exchange. The domestic economy continues to revolve around subsistence agriculture, which accounts for 40% of GDP and employs 60% of the workforce, mainly small landholder. In 1995-97, Ghana made mixed progress under a three-year structural adjustment program in cooperation with the IMF. On the minus side, public sector wage increases and regional peacekeeping commitments have led to continued inflationary deficit financing, depreciation of the cide and rising public discontent with Ghana austerity measures.

However, as Betts's and Panford's studies demonstrate, natural resources are not sufficient to guarantee a nation's economic health. Indeed, they may in some ways be detrimental, as Panford suggests, because they make a nation attractive to what must be seen as the imperialistic forces of globalization. Ghana's gold reserves, for example, are a mixed blessing.

These letters by Africans of different nations suggest the scope of the problems visited upon the continent by international monetary policy. All of these problems exist to some extent in Ghana:

The IMF's economic policies have and continue to hurt women in my home country of Kenya and across sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana, for instance, is a country which has been touted as a poster child for the success of IMF programs. However, under IMF requirements to limit domestic spending, public spending on health, education and agriculture in Ghana have been falling and nearly half of Ghanians live below the poverty line. These government cuts hit women particularly hard because women are forced to provide the missing public services to their families and children, and to address the consequences of missing services: death and disease. Women are worse off today than they were a decade ago -- before Structural Adjustment Policies were pushed by the IMF. No "trickle down" has reached these women." Ms. Njoki Njoroge Njehu, Kenya.

As noted in the studies by Blunch and Verner, this problem of structural biases against women is an especially important concern in Ghana, where women are less likely to be educated and more likely to have their labor and health exploited as a result of lower access to education than are men.

Another dire consequence of international monetary policy is its long-lasting effects:

The issue of debt is an obscene reality for Africans across the continent. The IMF loaned money to the apartheid governments and Nelson Mandela's government is expected to pay those loans back. The IMF supported Mobutu knowing well that the loans made to Zaire went into Mobutu's personal accounts. In Southern Africa -- Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and all across the continent the IMF has not only hurt current generations, but they have devastated the heritage of future generations." Professor Dennis Brutus, South Africa

Finally, as noted also by Blunch and Verner, there are trickle-down effects from international monetary policy. Not only does such policy keep people poor, but it can be deadly:

The three leading causes of death in Zambia today include AIDS, malnutrition and malaria. Each of these is related to the slavish pursuit by the Zambian Government of the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs. For example, cuts in government subsidies to the health sector, in obeisance to the IMF policies, mean that those who suffer from malarial infection go untreated and die because most people can not afford the cost for treatment. In addition, hunger and starvation are rampant in Zambia because the IMF has forced the nation to become a cash crop rather than a food crop producer. Because so many Zambians can not grow their own food, nor afford the food that is imported, they starve and many die." Mr. Ezekiel Pajibo, Liberia

All of these studies, and our own common sense, confirm that the economic problems faced by all Ghanaians are worst for those who have the least social and cultural power in society, which means primarily women and their children, especially those in the most rural parts of the country.

Inequality between men and women has direct demographic consequences in diverse societies. This is the central finding of a series of reports on gender inequalities and demographic behavior in Egypt, India, and Ghana/Kenya, published by the Population Council in 1994 and written by Council staff and consultants.

Gender inequalities in families, mirrored in other levels of society, are profound in all these countries and play an important role in reproductive decisionmaking and demographic change," says Dr. Cynthia B. Lloyd, Council Senior Associate and Director of Social Science Research, Research Division, and co-author of the Egypt study.

No nation can prosper if its women are left behind, and Ghana cannot have a brighter future until women are better educated, better protected by law, and better able to support themselves and their children:

The link between women's economic insecurity and high fertility - in which children serve as women's insurance against destitution - is emphasized throughout the reports, which reveal myriad sources of this insecurity. In Ghana, high levels of polygyny and marital instability threaten women's economic status.

Women's subordinate status in marriage and society promotes high fertility in other ways and also compromises their reproductive health, with obvious demographic consequences (such as high levels of infant and maternal mortality in many areas)

Failure to acknowledge local realities of reproductive behavior, family structure, and gender relations can undermine the effectiveness of family planning programs. In Ghana and Kenya (the first two countries in sub-Saharan Africa to implement national population policies), family planning programs make assumptions about family structure that apply more to Kenya than to Ghana - for example, that husbands and wives have similar fertility goals and that fathers fully share the costs of children. This may have contributed to the limited success of Ghana's family planning program. Fertility has fallen less than 13% in Ghana since the 1970s, compared to a decline of more than 30% in Kenya over the same period.

All Ghanaians can have a bright future. The path is not clear, but it is discernible, not easy, but conquerable.