New paper! Niels-Hugo Blunch and I just finished a paper that examines the effectiveness of participation in adult literacy programs in Ghana. The abstract is below. You can download the paper here.

This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation. Furthermore, there appears to be relatively little effect of participation on individual literacy and numeracy skills for all types of households. Hence, the positive effects of participation seem to arise not from literacy skills taught in the programs, but rather from another major component, which focuses on income generating activities, and/or from other factors such as improvements as a result of an expanded network.