What are the benefits of education in Africa as currently offered?

In our review paper “Education in Africa: What Are We Learning?” ( https://bit.ly/3gwWx7p ), we identified recent papers that estimate the returns to education in African countries.

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In South Africa, Samahiya uses the compulsory education policy of 1996 to identify returns and finds an increase of 12% to 16% in monthly earnings. https://custom.cvent.com/4E741122FD8B4A1B97E483EC8BB51CC4/files/returnstohumancapitalinvestmentsv2.pdf by Samahiya 2020

In Tunisia, “returns have decreased across cohorts by around 1/3 although they remain large even for the later cohorts… One more year of education increases the chance of public sector employment by 4 percentage points.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321258805_The_evolution_of_returns_to_education_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa_Evidence_from_comparable_education_policy_changes_in_Tunisia/link/5a44dd7eaca272d2945c4dfd/download by @mqpellicer 2017

Lehmann-Uschner estimates the return to education for the self-employed non-agricultural workers in western Uganda. “One additional year of schooling increases average daily income from market vending by 7 percent.” https://custom.cvent.com/4E741122FD8B4A1B97E483EC8BB51CC4/files/returnstoeducationlehmannuschner.pdf 2020

Using a national household survey in Uganda, returns to schooling are estimated to be 16% for both the self-employed and for wage earners. https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/wp2015-021.pdf by Kavuma et al. 2015

In Mozambique, Jones et al. use expenditures per contributing family member in the household rather than wages and find a return of 10.5 percent points. Returns "have been falling over time” as access to basic education improves. https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/evolution-private-returns-education-during-post-conflict-transformation-0 by Jones et al. 2018

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, researchers find comparable returns in the formal and informal sectors and higher returns for secondary and tertiary schooling. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2690726 by Kuepié and Nordman 2015

Serneels et al. show using Tanzanian data that estimates vary substantively (between 6 and 14 percentage points) depending on how the survey measuring wages & education is designed. Published: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775716303958
Working paper: http://ftp.iza.org/dp10002.pdf  by Serneels et al. 2017

In Ghana and Kenya, Valerio et al. find a positive association between reading ability and adult earnings, although the relationship remains statistically significant only in Ghana once they control for years of schooling. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25678 by Valerio et al. 2016

Returns, of course, are not just monetary.

@Tassew18 and @arayamee use longitudinal data in Ethiopia to show that access to early child education increases the odds of completing secondary school by a quarter. https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=CSAE2017&paper_id=367 by Woldehanna and Araya 2017

Using data from 53 countries, including many from Sub-Saharan Africa, Oye et al. find that schooling for women has positive returns on their children’s survival, but schooling together with learning yields significantly higher gains. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7563/64b832ced35cafee4850ab6b1c70293e205e.pdf by Oye et al. 2016

Based on multiple surveys from 25 countries, estimated return to education is 9.6% in Africa (compared to 7.6% for all regions in sample), 10.8% for urban workers in Africa, and 10.9% for female workers in Africa.
https://www.academia.edu/16756670/Returns_to_education_in_developing_countries_Evidence_from_the_Living_Standards_and_Measurement_Surveys by @evandpeet et al. 2015

A large study with data from around the world shows that the private return to a year of schooling is 10.5% in Africa, second only to that in Latin America and the Caribbean (11%). https://harrypatrinos.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/returns-decennial-ed-econ-2018.pdf by Psacharopoulos and @hpatrinos 2018