Education: Pathway to Empowerment for Ghanaian Women?

Abstract

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this article makes the case that the benefits of education for women is context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. This study shows that more than twice as many women aged 18–29 have had some form of education compared with those above 50. However, it finds that while all the women above 50 who worked in the formal sector worked in better paying public sector jobs, this was not the case of the women aged 18–29, almost half of whom worked in the private informal sector with more insecure incomes.