IDEP Policy Brief 007/18 - Understanding the Relationship between Health and Education for Development in Nigeria, by Dr Kalu Christopher

The study identified three types of causalities between health and education in Nigeria. The first is the no evidence causality between primary school enrolment, secondary school enrolment, literacy rate and out-of-pocket expenditure. This implies that there is no policy adjustment in any of the variables that could influence the other and again there is no relationship between the variables. This is majorly as a result of high out-of-pocket health expenditure in Nigeria which is capable of making households incur catastrophic health expenditure and exacerbating poverty. The second is the unidirectional relationship running from out-of-pocket health expenditure to burden-of-disease, mortality rate and literacy rate.