Many young people are getting access to secondary education and an increasing number also university education. An increasing share of youth in Africa are university students, 9% in 2018. In today’s knowledge economy, university students carry a key role in development. They are therefore an important group to study and understand better.
In Ghana, a country of 31 million inhabitants, 57% of the population is under 25. In 2019, 17% were enrolled in university compared to only 9% 10 years earlier. But local scholarship opportunities are few and increasingly individuals carry the costs of tuition. Nearly a third of 15-29-year-olds are not in education, employment or training.
Many young people across the continent with higher education degrees are more likely to consider migration than the adult population as a whole. Ghana is typical of many African countries on this front. Its number of internationally mobile students is the closest to the African average of 5.8%.
SOURCE: THE CONVERSATION