Childcare Access and Maternal Employment. Panel Data Evidence from Ghana,

• In Event: Integrated approaches to ECD

Proposal

Access to early childhood education affects not only the development of children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills but also their parent's participation in the labor market. Therefore, expanding access to early childhood education is recognized as one important means of reducing gender disparities in the labor market. Ghana, which this study is targeting, has recorded a dramatic expansion of access to early childhood education in recent years, having made early childhood education free and compulsory for children aged 4 and 5 years old since 2008.

Regarding the academic accumulations in the same line of this topic, the relationship between children's access to childcare programs and mothers' access to the labor market and outcomes has long been debated, and the results are still inconclusive. Besides, most previous studies have been conducted and investigated in developed countries. Given this circumstance, little is known about the effect of access to childcare programs on maternal employment and labor market outcome. Hence, this study aims to empirically examine the effects of access to childcare programs on maternal employment and labor market outcomes in Ghana. The contribution of this study is to find new evidence for previous research by examining and clarifying the relationship between access to child care and maternal employment through the case of Ghana, a developing country in Africa. Furthermore, the results of this study can contribute to promoting public investment and policies in early childhood education in other African countries where progress in early childhood education is lagging compared to other regions.

As a methodology, this study utilizes a panel dataset, namely the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey collected by the Economic Growth Centre at Yale University and the Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana (Legon, Ghana). The data collection has implemented approximately every three years from 2009-2010. This study uses 3 waves of the dataset collected from 2009 to 2019. This study adopts an Instrumental Variable (IV) Approach for the empirical strategy to account for endogeneity in children's access to childcare programs. The IV employs the child's birth date and utilizes a threshold for starting point of the preschool academic year. Besides, this study also examines how children's access to childcare programs affects parental employment and labor market outcomes over the medium and long term by using panel data characteristics.

Our analysis found that children’s access to childcare programs positively affects maternal employment, and its result is statistically significant. Furthermore, comparing the estimates using OLS and IV revealed that the IV results were more petite, indicating an endogenous bias in the OLS results. The finding also shows the effect on their wage with statistical significance regarding maternal labor market outcome. That result implies that the expansion of the childcare program positively impacts maternal employment and labor outcomes in Ghana, a developing African country. Our work has new implications for academic accumulation on the same topic and for other African countries that have made slow progress in early childhood education.

Author

• Ryuto Minami, Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University