**Figure 7.  Share of youths aged 15-18 considering migrating, by sex and intended destination.**

**Figure 8. Share of youths aged 19-25 considering migrating, by sex and intended destination.**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 100% Ethiopia Malawi 100% Ethiopia Malawi<br>Nigeria Average Nigeria Average<br>90% 90%<br>80% 80%<br>70% 70%<br>60% 57% 60% 56%<br>53%<br>50% 50% 46%<br>44% 44%<br>40%<br>40% 36% 40%<br>31%<br>30% 25% 30% 26% 26%<br>20% 14% 15% 13% 13% 20% 14% 14% 15%<br>9%<br>10% 10%<br>0% 0%<br>Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female<br>Capital city City/town Another country Rural No preference Capital city City/town Another country Rural No preference<br><!-- End of picture text --> Note. Each respondent was able to select more than one destination. T-tests of equality of means were conducted across men and women within each country. Only average shares are reported for the sake of clarity. Source: Own calculations based on Source: Own calculations based on Ethiopia - High Frequency Phone Survey (2020-2023); Malawi - High-Frequency Phone Survey 2020-2024; Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey 2020-2021. Datasets downloaded from https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/hfps/?page=1&ps=15&repo=hfps on January 2, 2024

# **5. Empirical analysis and discussion**

# **5.1. Main findings and comparison with other studies**

In line with the framework proposed by Sumberg & Okali (2013), we delve into the factors that impact aspirations related to completing university and post-graduate studies, pursuing STEMrelated careers, and planning to migrate. These determinants encompass both structural and relational factors, which include personal, household, and community characteristics.<sup>7</sup>

**In the absence of barriers, our analysis reveals that female youths, particularly in low-income households, exhibit a lower likelihood of aspiring to complete university or post-graduate degrees and pursuing STEM-related careers compared to their male counterparts.** Specifically, female youths in Ethiopia are 11% less likely to aspire to complete university or postgraduate studies, and in Nigeria, they are 9% less likely ( **Table 1** ). Additionally, female youths in Ethiopia are 7% less inclined to desire careers in STEM-related fields compared to males, while in Malawi, the difference is 6% ( **Table 2** ). Moreover, our findings indicate that youths from the

> 7 We computed robustness checks for all logit regressions to counterprove our results and these checks include various means such as using different estimators, different weight functions, different standard errors, inclusion or exclusion of the constant term, and omission of some regressors (Bianco & Martínez, 2009; Cramer, 2007; Wooldridge, 2002). To test the robustness of our results, we conducted two different checks. First, we followed Wooldridge (2002) to include logistic disturbances in the full aspirations models and re-estimated them by omitting some regressors. In particular, we carried out some leave-out analysis by estimating individual, household and community characteristics. Results confirm the robustness of our results by simple simulations of the logit regressions for different disturbance distributions. Moreover, we performed test for non-distortion. Inspecting the rural sample, we further observed results that confirm the robustness of our results. We observed some variability only for selected results in the migration regression. All results are available under request.

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