Governance and structural transformation in Africa: Thresholds of lifelong gender inclusive education

The present research is focused on how lifelong gender inclusive education moderates the effect of governance on structural transformation. It is based on a sample of forty-one countries in Africa for the period 2004 to 2021 and the adopted empirical strategy is the generalized method of moments (GMM). The estimation exercise is tailored such that lifelong gender inclusive education in interacted with political (i.e., political stability/no violence and voice & accountability), economic (i.e., government effectiveness and regulatory quality) and institutional (i.e., corruption-control and the rule of law) governance dynamics in order to affect manufacturing value added. Lifelong gender inclusive education is understood as the combined knowledge acquired in terms of gender parity education in primary, secondary and tertiary schools. The following findings are established. (i) Gender inclusive lifelong learning does not effectively moderate political governance and associated components (i.e., political stability/no violence and voice & accountability) as well as institutional governance and associated components (i.e., corruption-control and the rule of law) in order to improve manufacturing value added. (ii) Gender inclusive lifelong learning effectively moderates economic governance and associated dimensions (i.e., government effectiveness and regulatory quality) to improve manufacturing value added. However, only the thresholds corresponding to government effectiveness and economic governance are within policy range. Robustness of the findings is broadly confirmed, especially within the remits of additional elements in the conditioning information set and general governance. Policy implications are discussed.