Private Wage Returns to Schooling in Nigeria: 1996-1999

In the last two decades, primary and secondary school enrollment rates have declined in Nigeria while enrollment rates in post-secondary school have increased. This paper estimates from the General Household Survey for Nigeria the private returns to schooling associated with levels of educational attainment for wage and self-employed workers. The estimates for both men and women are small at primary and secondary levels, 2 to 4 percent, but are substantial at post-secondary education level, 10-15 percent. These schooling return estimates may account for the recent trends in enrollments. Thus, increasing public investment to encourage increased attendance in basic education is not justifiable on grounds of private efficiency, unless investments to increase school quality have higher private returns. With high private returns to post-secondary schooling, students at this level should pay tuition, to recoup more of the public costs of schooling, which may be redistributed to poor families through scholarships.Schooling Investment; Private Wage Returns; Efficiency; Equity; Nigeria

Female Schooling, Non-Market Productivity, and Labor Market Participation in Nigeria

Economists have argued that increasing female schooling positively influences the labor supply of married women by inducing a faster rise in market productivity relative to non-market productivity. I use the Nigerian Labor Force Survey to investigate how own and husband's schooling affect women's labor market participation. I find that additional years of postsecondary education increases wage market participation probability by as much as 15.2%. A marginal increase in primary schooling has no effect on probability of wage employment, but could enhance participation rates in self-employment by about 5.40%. These effects are likely to be stronger when a woman is married to a more educated spouse. The results suggest that primary education is more productive in non-wage work relative to wage work, while postsecondary education is more productive in wage work. Finally, I find evidence suggesting that non-market work may not be a normal good for married women in Nigeria.Nigeria, Female Schooling, Women's Labor Market Participation, Non-Market Productivity

Intra-Household Redistribution of Income and Calorie Consumption in South-Western Nigeria

This study investigates how per capita calorie intake in low income households of rural southwestern Nigeria responds to changes in total household income and women's share of household income. The study addresses two major questions. First, is calorie-income elasticity large enough to justify the use of income increases as a food/nutrition policy strategy for increasing calorie intake among low income households? Second, what is the potential effect of intra-household redistribution of income from men to women on per capita calorie consumption? My results show that calorie-income elasticity is small and close to zero, implying that income policies may not be the most effective way to achieve substantial improvements in calorie consumption. I also find that increases in women's share of household income are likely to result in marginal declines in per capita food calorie intake, suggesting that income redistribution from men to women would not increase per capita food energy intake in these households.Nigeria, Intra-Household Redistribution of Income, Women's Income Share Elasticity, Income Elasticity, Calorie Consumption.

Medium-Scale Farming as a Policy Tool for Agricultural Commercialisation and Small-Scale Farms Transformation in Nigeria

Recent evidence suggests that the changing structure of land ownership in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the major new trends affecting African agri-food systems. Research in several African countries shows a rapid rise of medium-scale farms (MSFs) of 5–50ha. MSFs have become an important force for increasing agricultural production, particularly in countries with significant unutilised arable land and potential for area expansion, such as Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia. Most African countries’ national agricultural investment plans and policy strategies officially regard the smallholder farming sector as the main vehicle for achieving agricultural growth, food security, and poverty reduction objectives. However, many governments have adopted land and financial policies that implicitly encourage the rise of emergent MSFs. Given the documented rise in MSFs in many African countries, the APRA Nigeria Work Stream 1 team developed a research agenda focused on understanding the potentially complex ways in which these farms affect the productivity and commercialisation potential of small-scale farms (SSFs). We investigated the characteristics of MSFs, the processes that produces them, their relative importance in the agricultural commercialisation process, the relationship between farm scale and productivity, and whether MSFs influence the behaviour and welfare of the millions of SSF households around them. Our findings are based on two years of survey data on MSFs and nearby SSFs in 2019 and 2021 in Ogun and Kaduna states. This policy brief summarises our main findings, drawing upon several APRA-supported reports

Historical Missionary Activity, Schooling, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission stations in Nigeria, we find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to greater missionary activity have higher levels of schooling. This effect is robust to omitted heterogeneity, ethnicity fixed effects, and reverse causation. We find inter-generational factors and the persistence of early advantages in educational infrastructure to be key channels through which the effect has persisted. Consistent with theory, the effect of missions on current schooling is larger for population subgroups that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education