Examining the impact of the free senior high school policy and women empowerment on secondary school enrolment in Ghana: The bounds test approach

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of women empowerment and free senior high school on secondary school enrolment in Ghana. The Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) estimation method, which examines both short- and long-term effects, was utilized to analyze data obtained from the World Bank database and the ILO database covering the period 1992–2021. Employing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling technique, it was observed that the proportion of women to men in parliament, the FSHS policy, and pre-secondary school enrollment all have positive effects on secondary school enrollment in both the short and long run. Again, though we observe a negative impact of FSHS on female secondary school enrollment in the short run, in the long run, it increases the enrollment by large, while we observe that women to men in parliament and presecondary school enrollment also increase female secondary school enrollment in the long run. These findings have important implications for policymakers and stakeholders in Ghana’s education sector.