Formal education and the contemporaneous dynamics of literacy, labour market participation and poverty reduction in Burkina Faso

Abstract

This research examines the link between education and sustainable development in Burkina Faso. We achieve this using data on 10,411 households from the 2014 National Survey on Household Living Conditions, and a statistical methodology based on fully parametric and semi-parametric recursive trivariate probit modelling. The results show that our embraced systemic approach is economically and statistically significant as shown by the 95% confidence intervals on the three correlation coefficients in the model. Furthermore, education is found to raise literacy skills by a factor of 2.233 for primary and 3.877 for secondary education. However, an improvement in literacy skills paradoxically reduces (−0.682) the likelihood of active labour market participation. Simultaneously however, active labour market participation is found to reduce (−1.384) the incidence of households' poverty. Therefore, to boost productivity, reduce poverty and achieve sustained economic growth, in addition to new industrial policies for structural transformation of the national economy, policy makers in Burkina Faso should consider education and minimum wage reforms to incentivise high skilled labour force participation in the local labour market.