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The Value of Education
Investing in education is the single most effective means of reducing poverty.
Education is more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is one of the most important investments a country can make in its people and its future and is critical to reducing poverty and inequality:
- Education gives people critical skills and tools to help them better provide for themselves and their children
- Education helps people work better and can create opportunities for sustainable and viable economic growth now and into the future
- Education helps fight the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, reduces mother and child mortality and helps improve health
- Education encourages transparency, good governance, stability and helps fight against graft and corruption.
The impact of investment in education is profound: education results in raising income, improving health, promoting gender equality, mitigating climate change, and reducing poverty.
Here is a breakdown of the impact of education on people's lives:
Education is the key to unlocking a country’s potential for economic growth:
- An individual’s potential income can increase as much as 10% with each additional year of schooling.
- A farmer’s productivity increases nearly 9% with 4 years of primary schooling.
- Annual GDP increases by 1% with each year of additional schooling.
- An increase of one standard deviation in student scores on international assessments of literacy and mathematics is associated with a 2% increase in annual GDP per capita growth.
- If all students in low income countries left school with basic reading skills 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty. This is equal to a 12% cut in global poverty.
The most effective investment for achieving long-term health benefits is educating girls and women:
- Every 10% point increase in girls' secondary enrolment in low income countries will save approximately 350,000 children's lives and reduce maternal mortality by 15,000 every year.
- Girls' education is often the single most powerful factor affecting health outcomes such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, the propensity of mothers to seek modern birth options, the availability of those options because more and better trained birth attendants are available, the rate of risky teenage births, and the number of children she will have.
- HIV and AIDS infection rates drop by 50% among children who complete their primary education.
- If all children received a primary education, 7000,000 HIV cases worldwide could be prevented each year.
- An estimated 1.8 million children’s lives in sub-Saharan Africa could be saved this year if their mothers had at least a secondary education.
Education is key to women’s rights, self-expression and civic engagement:
- Every additional year of schooling reduces the number of children a woman will have by 10%.
- Investing in girls education could boost sub-Saharan Africa agricultural output by 25%.
- Girls’ income potential increases by 15% with each additional year of primary education.
- Increasing the number of women with secondary education by 1% can increase annual per capita economic growth by 0.3%.
Last Modified: October 12, 2011
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