- Jobs Gap Cuts Ghana’s Human-Capital Potential From 45% To 25%—World Bank
A child born in Ghana is expected to achieve only 45% of the productivity she could attain with complete education and full health, highlighting the economic cost of weaknesses in the country’s schools, healthcare system and labour market.
The estimate, contained in the World Bank’s Human Capital Country Brief for Ghana, places the country above the Sub-Saharan African average of 40% but below the 48% average for lower-middle-income economies.
The position deteriorates sharply when the likelihood that adults will find productive employment is incorporated.
Ghana’s Utilisation-adjusted Human Capital Index stands at 0.25, meaning a child born today is expected to realise only one-quarter of her potential productivity after deficiencies in health, education and employment are considered together.
“A child born in Ghana will be 45% as productive when she grows up as she could be if she enjoyed complete education and full health,” the World Bank said.
After adjusting for labour utilisation, it added, children born today would be “25% as productive in adulthood as they could have been if they had access to full health and education, and they became fully employed adults”.
The contrast between the headline Human Capital Index of 0.45 and the utilisation-adjusted score of 0.25 exposes a two-stage development failure.
Ghana is not investing sufficiently in the health and education of its children to maximise their productive potential. Even the human capital that is created is not being fully absorbed and deployed through productive employment.
The brief was published in October 2023, with the main Human Capital Index drawing on the latest data available as of 2020. The complementary indicators use different reference years, in some cases extending to 2022. The figures therefore provide a structural benchmark rather than a real-time assessment of present conditions.
The most striking gap lies within education. A Ghanaian child who enters school at age four can expect to complete 12.1 years of schooling by her 18th birthday. Once the quality of learning is considered, however, those years are equivalent to only six years of effective education.
In other words, Ghana loses approximately 6.1 years—or just over half of the expected schooling period—to weak learning outcomes.
“Factoring in what children actually learn, expected years of school is 6 years,” the World Bank said.
The finding challenges the tendency to assess educational progress mainly through enrolment, attendance and completion.
Children may spend more than a decade within the school system but leave without the literacy, numeracy, problem-solving and technical skills that the length of their education should imply.
Students in Ghana recorded an average harmonised test score of 307 on a scale where 625 represents advanced attainment and 300 represents minimum attainment.
Ghana’s score is therefore only slightly above the minimum benchmark.
The figures suggest that the principal education challenge is no longer simply getting children into classrooms. It is ensuring that time spent in school produces knowledge and skills of measurable economic value.
This learning deficit has consequences beyond examination performance. It affects labour productivity, business competitiveness, innovation and Ghana’s capacity to move workers from low-productivity activities into more sophisticated industries and services.
Some of the complementary indicators show progress in access and participation.
The primary-school completion rate stood at 94% in 2018, above the Sub-Saharan African average. However, this was below the 99% recorded in 2015.
The fall indicates that earlier gains in completion cannot be taken for granted.
Youth literacy among people aged 15 to 24 stood at 93% in 2020, also above the regional average.
Yet literacy rates alone do not capture whether young people possess the depth of skills required for modern employment. The low harmonised test score and large difference between expected and learning-adjusted schooling suggest that basic literacy is not translating automatically into high-quality human capital.
Child labour remains another pressure on educational attainment. About 15% of children aged five to 17 were engaged in economic activities in 2018.
Although the figure was below the regional average, it means a significant share of children may be dividing their time between education and work—or leaving school prematurely to support household incomes.
Ghana performs relatively strongly on child survival. Of every 100 children born in the country, 95 survive to the age of five. The child mortality rate among those aged five to 14 declined from 12 deaths per 1,000 children in 2016 to 10 in 2021.
Neonatal mortality also improved, falling from 26 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016 to 23 in 2021.
Vaccination coverage is another area of relative strength. In 2022, 99% of infants received the third dose of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine, unchanged from 2017 and above the regional average.
But malnutrition continues to damage the prospects of a sizeable minority of children.
Approximately 82% of children under five were not stunted, meaning 18% experienced or faced the effects of chronic undernutrition.
“This means that 18 out of 100 children are at risk of cognitive and physical limitations that can last a lifetime,” the World Bank said.
Stunting is not only a health problem. It can affect brain development, school performance, earnings and economic productivity throughout adulthood.
Its persistence means some children enter the education system already carrying disadvantages that classroom interventions alone may not fully reverse.
The developmentally-on-track indicator provides a broader measure of early-childhood welfare. In 2018, 68% of children aged 24 to 59 months were considered on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being.
The figure exceeded the regional average but still left almost one-third of young children outside the desired developmental path.
The World Bank estimated that 77% of Ghanaian 15-year-olds would survive to age 60. This implies that almost one-quarter would die before reaching that age if prevailing mortality conditions persisted.
Life expectancy at birth stood at 64 years in 2021, unchanged from 2016, although it remained above the Sub-Saharan African average.
The lack of improvement over five years raises questions about the burden of preventable diseases, access to quality healthcare and the effectiveness of public-health investment.
A country can expand access to education and improve childhood survival, but the economic return will remain constrained if adults experience poor health during their most productive years.
The utilisation-adjusted index shows that education and health investments cannot be assessed separately from labour-market outcomes.
Ghana’s standard Human Capital Index was slightly higher for girls, at 0.46, than for boys, at 0.44.
Once employment utilisation was included, the position reversed. The score for girls fell to 0.25, compared with 0.26 for boys.
The difference is small, but it suggests that girls’ relative advantage in human-capital formation is not being fully converted into labour-market participation and productive employment.
Female labour-force participation among women aged 25 and above stood at 74% in 2022, up slightly from 73% in 2017 and above the regional average.
However, participation does not necessarily mean secure or productive employment. A substantial share of workers may remain in informal, low-paying or low-productivity activities that make limited use of their education.
Youth unemployment stood at 7% in 2022, compared with 6% in 2017. Adult unemployment was recorded at 3%, unchanged from five years earlier.
These relatively low unemployment rates should be interpreted cautiously in an economy where many people cannot afford to remain completely without work and may enter vulnerable self-employment or informal occupations.
The central issue is therefore not only whether Ghanaians work, but whether their jobs make productive use of their knowledge and skills.
Human-capital spending is often discussed as a social obligation involving schools, hospitals, nutrition and welfare.
The World Bank’s findings demonstrate that it is also an economic-growth strategy.
Weak learning limits the sophistication of Ghana’s workforce. Childhood stunting reduces cognitive and physical capacity. Premature adult mortality shortens working lives. Poor job matching then prevents the country from capturing the full return on the investments it does make.
The result is an economy operating far below its potential even before constraints involving capital, infrastructure and technology are considered.
Ghana’s challenge is not merely to increase the number of years children spend in school or expand access to health services. It must improve the quality of those services and connect better-educated, healthier citizens to productive work.
The gap between 12.1 expected years of schooling and six learning-adjusted years should be treated as an economic emergency.
So should the fall from 45% potential productivity to 25% once employment is considered.
Ghana is producing only part of the human capital its children could develop and using only part of what it produces.
