Following substantial progress towards universal primary education, governments have increasingly shifted attention to reducing barriers at the secondary school level. Tertiary education participation remains rare across Sub-Saharan Africa, meaning secondary school is increasingly the final stage of education most young people will complete before entering the labour market. In this paper, we study the labour market consequences of Ghana’s Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (1996), a component of which removed fees at the lower secondary level. Using a difference-in-differences design based on treatment intensity and birth-cohort exposure, we estimate the effects of the reform on forms of economic (in)activity, disaggregated by gender. We find that the reform raised educational attainment: scaled by the 10th-90th percentile range of the observed dose, the average causal response implies years of education rose by roughly a quarter of a year, junior high school completion by 2.8 percentage points and literacy by 4.6 percentage points. In the labour market, the reform bolstered employment in the districts where it had most scope to operate, and did so along different margins for men and women. Men’s participation in any productive activity was unchanged while employment for pay or profit rose (3.5 percentage points) and production for own final use fell (2.9 percentage points) – a movement across the ICLS-19 production boundary. This occurred alongside a 2.5 percentage point gain in skilled occupations and a 2.4 percentage point gain in public sector employment. Women also left own-use production, by 3.9 percentage points, but only about three quarters of that exit entered employment: the remainder moving out of work and into care/family responsibilities. Women’s employment gain was almost wholly informal and vulnerable, with wage employment and skilled work falling. Demographic evidence suggests that part of women’s withdrawal reflects the timing of childbearing rather than a permanent change in labour supply.
