Effective Investment in Women’s Futures: Schooling with Learning

Abstract

Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries, this paper shows that the association of women’s education, defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy, with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. This research is part of the Research on Improving Systems of Education programme