attendance provides some measure of human resource potential of a country. The need to gather and analyze data on the population currently attending school thus becomes imperative. Additionally, data on the level of education attained by various segments of the population does not only provide an idea of a nation’s readiness to harness human resources for socio-economic development but also it helps to identify potential literacy gaps.

The school attendance profile for the District’s population 3 years and older is presented in Figure 3.2. Of the total persons aged 3 years and older, 32.1 percent had attended school in the past, 37.7 percent were schooling at the time of the census while 30.3 percent have never attended school. Females are less likely to have attended school in the past than males: 27.8 percent for females and 37.2 percent for males. Meanwhile, the proportion of females who have never attended school (39.1%)

Table 3.10 presents results on the population aged 3 years and older by level of education and sex. Out of the 10,375 persons who are currently attending school, 18.1 percent are in Kindergarten, 52.3 percent are in Primary School, 18.3 percent are in Junior High School while 5.9 percent are in Senior High School. There are not much disparities between sexes in level of education.

With regards to those who attended school in the past 36.4 percent attended Primary, 30.5 percent attended JSS/JHS, 19.4 percent attended Middle school and only 2.5 percent attended Tertiary. Also, the results show that a higher proportion of the females (45.4%) than that of the males (28.3%) ended their education at the primary level while a higher proportion of the males (3.9%) than the females (1.0%) completed Tertiary education (Table 3.10).

Literacy and Education

There is a relationship between education, human resource development and economic growth (UNDP). A critical component of education is the ability to read and write, that is, literacy. Literacy questions were posed to persons aged 11 years and older. Questions on education, on the other hand, were posed to persons 3 years and older.

Literacy

Table 3.9 shows that three-quarters (66.8%) of the population aged 11 years and older is literate while one-third (33.2%) are not literate. Of the literate population, more than two-thirds (68.3%) of the population can read and write in Ghanaian language while one-quarter (25.3%) can read and write in Ghanaian language only. The results further show that the number of females who are non-literates (5,231) is almost three times more than that of the males (1,801).

Table 3.9: Population 11 years and older by sex, age and literacy status