Publications

Achieving basic numeracy and literacy skills in Sub-Saharan Africa is essential as both have been linked to benefits at the micro- and macro-economic level. During the post-colonial period, enrolment and years of schooling have increased substantially in the region, however, the expected returns failed to materialise. Therefore, focusing on outputs of the education system, such as numeracy and literacy, rather than the inputs is important to better understand the development of educational attainment. Data on literacy is more widely available and has been studied, but there has been no systematic tracing of numerical skills in the post-colonial period. Combining data from censuses and household surveys, we estimate numeracy at the subnational level for Sub-Saharan Africa employing the ABCC-Index. Additionally, we carefully evaluate the suitability of the index and our data to capture basic numeracy – deeming it to be robust. We do not find clear trends in numeracy for the birth cohorts between 1950 and 1990, however, we observe strong regional differences with Southern Africa performing best and Western Africa worst.

School enrolment has increased at an unprecedented scale in Sub-Saharan Africa but learning and the associated education efficiency have not. Given that resources are limited, the efficient use of inputs is of utmost importance for sustainable development. Hence, we investigate whether improvements in children’s nutrition can improve learning and hence efficiency. To assess this relationship, we employ average female height as our proxy for nutrition during childhood. For learning, we estimate numeracy and efficiency using a linearized version of the Whipple Index. Our data is at the subnational level focusing on the birth decades from 1950 to 1999. To deal with the endogeneity of nutrition, we use an instrumental variable approach. Our instrument is negative rainfall shocks during childhood which can adversely affect nutrition. We find that better nutrition increases education efficiency. Therefore, investments in nutrition can advance self-sustaining long-term growth based on human capital in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A'Hearn, Delfino, and Nuvolari recently argued in this journal that the indicator function of age heaping for education, and numeracy in particular, is quite limited. In contrast, we show empirically that by applying the methodological elements that were developed over the past decade, age-heaping-based numeracy research can be an important tool for economic history.