Where has all the education gone in Sub-Saharan Africa? Employment and other outcomes among secondary school and university leavers
Anecdotal evidence and generalisations abound concerning the employment outcomes of secondary school and university leavers, but there is very little solid, accurate information on what these groups in African countries do after they have completed their education. Using tracer surveys, this paper presents comprehensive time-series information on the activity profiles of representative samples of secondary school leavers and university graduates in Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The paper shows that much of the anecdotal evidence surrounding the labour market outcomes of these groups is spurious. While employment outcomes are generally much better than expected, the tracer surveys highlight the enormous challenges of educating and subsequently utilising secondary school leavers and university graduates in an efficient and effective manner in low-income African countries. In particular, given the paucity of new employment opportunities in the formal sector, much more needs to be done in order to ensure that both these groups are better prepared for productive self-employment, especially in high growth and higher skill activities.
|Date of creation:||2006|
|Date of revision:|
|Contact details of provider:|| Postal: Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany|
Web page: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de
More information through EDIRC
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Samer Al-Samarrai & Barry Reilly, 2005. "Education, Employment and Earnings of Secondary School-Leavers in Tanzania: Evidence from a Tracer Study," PRUS Working Papers 31, Poverty Research Unit at Sussex, University of Sussex.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:128. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Joachim Winter)
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.