Development and growth cannot be experienced in any part of the world without good
education. Basic education is one of the effective investments in improving
economies, reducing illiteracy, creating self-reliant and healthy society. In view of
this, government and NGOs have constituted various policies and intervention
programmes to make sure children of school going age enroll, attend and remain in
school till completion (at least the basic level). Despite these efforts, studies have
shown that dropout rates remain high in rural areas and in the three northern regions
of Ghana. The purpose of the research is to estimate the probability of a child
dropping out of school at some point within the basic level in Northern Ghana. Data
was obtained from the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports on annual enrollment
levels for each district for the years 2000 to 2007. Survival Analysis which is a time to
event analysis was used to investigate the effect of gender and region on survival time
(i.e. time before dropout). Particularly, the Kaplan-Meier method was utilized for
plotting the survival and hazard functions. Log rank test was used to compare the
survival curves. The Cox Proportional Hazards Model was used to fit the data.
Findings indicated that the region of a child has significant effect on the potential of
his/her dropout of school. On the other hand, gender had no significant influence on a
pupil’s dropout rate. The analysis also indicated that the Upper West region has the
lowest hazard of dropout and Northern Region has the highest Hazard of dropout of
school. It was also discovered that on the average, the potential of a child dropping
out of school occurred mostly at primary 2, 5 and 6. It is suggested that interventions
to reduce dropout rates should not be focused only on female pupils but on male
pupils as well.