Skills, Schooling and Non-Marital Teenage Pregnancy in Ghana

Previous studies have examined the relationship between education and non-marital pregnancy and between education and teen-pregnancy focusing mainly on how non-marital or teenage pregnancy affects individual human capital and also only rarely considering the intersection of the two groups—and have mainly considered developed countries, especially the US. This paper examines non-marital teenage pregnancy in Ghana, focusing on the role and interplay of Ghanaian and English reading skills, formal educational attainment, and adult literacy course participation. Pursuing first an instrumental variables strategy, using year of birth and region of birth interactions as identifying instruments, indicates that skills and schooling may be treated as predetermined to whether an unmarried teenage girl has experienced a pregnancy. Continuing, therefore, with linear probability models yields three main results. First, I confirm the finding from previous studies that educational attainment is negatively associated with either non-marital or teenage pregnancy. Second, however, once Ghanaian and English reading skills are introduced, the association between educational attainment and non-marital teenage pregnancy decreases or disappears altogether. Third, for the teenage girls who have not completed primary school, adult literacy course participation is associated with a much lower probability of experiencing a teenage pregnancy. Again, adult literacy programs are specifically targeted at youth and adults with only limited schooling and also, in addition to their primary focus on literacy and numeracy, typically incorporate health components, including information on contraception usage. In turn, this— couple with the results in this paper—indicates that these programs are beneficial not only in terms of literacy and numeracy per se but also in terms of public health. Adult literacy programs in Ghana, therefore, should be interesting for policy makers as a vehicle to increase the basic skills stock of Ghanaians who have fallen through the cracks of the traditional education system both in terms of basic literacy and numeracy and in terms of health knowledge, including contraceptive use. Directions for future research are also presented. † I thank participants at the Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America for helpful comments and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from Washington and Lee’s Lenfest Research Grant. Part of this research was carried out while visiting Princeton University’s Economics Department; the hospitality of the Department is gratefully acknowledged. The data were kindly provided by the Ghana Statistical Service. The findings and interpretations, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Ghana Statistical Service. 2 A bright future is the best contraceptive. –Marian Wright Edelman 1