Can Ghana Afford the Sustainable Development Goal on Education?

Abstract

There was much euphoria and enthusiasm surrounding the advent of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, but there was little empirical evidence regarding how much would be required of countries to achieve the goals. This article contributes to filling this gap by estimating what Ghana needs in fiscal terms to achieve SDG 4: Quality Education. The article estimated an education gap, which indicates the difference between what pertains to education indicators in Ghana and what SDG 4 sets to achieve. Further, the fiscal capacity needed to address the gap was estimated while taking cognisance of the nation’s education budget and fiscal space from tax revenues. The results indicated that Ghana is inefficient in its allocation of education resources. While the top-performing countries are, on average, spending less (4.18%) of their gross domestic product (GDP) on education and achieving more, Ghana is spending more (6.16%) of its GDP on education but achieving less. Thus, Ghana faces more of an allocation and efficiency challenge contrary to a resource challenge to attain SDG 4. Provided the nation wants to maintain its inefficiency track, it will need to allocate an additional 0.58 per cent of its GDP to education to boost its educational performance to the level of the top-performing countries.