Female Schooling and Women’s Labour Market Participation in Nigeria

Abstract

Currently there are pressures on African governments by international development organizations to pursue education policies which emphasize gender balance because contemporary economic development literature strongly associates economic growth and poverty reduction with increasing investment in female education. Schultz (2002) presents a detailed argument on why governments should invest more to educate girls. Specifically, increased female schooling is believed to be associated with decline in population growth rate due to reduced fertility rate, growth in per capita income due to increased income earning opportunities for women, increase in women empowerment due to increased control over economic resources, increase in child quality/welfare due to increased bargaining power for women in the household, and increase in available public resources for development due to increased tax base.

1 I thank the Economic Growth Center, Yale University, USA and the Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Postdoctoral Research on the Economics of the Family in Low Income Countries for providing the financial support for this study. I am especially grateful to T. Paul Schultz for his comments on previous drafts of this chapter. I also appreciate the useful comments I received from participants at the Economic Growth Center Development Lunch Seminar series and participants at the Conference on Growth, Poverty Reduction and Human Development in Africa, organized by the Centre for Study of African Economies (CSAE), Oxford University, UK, 2004. Finally I wish to acknowledge the Federal Office of Statistics (FOS), Lagos, Nigeria, who provided me with the Nigerian labour force survey data used for the analysis in this chapter. I am responsible for any errors that remain.