Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
6
IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION AND ITS LINK WITH DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Education is recognised as a “catalyst for development” 6 not only because it paves the
way for economic empowerment and growth, but also because it is the key to building
healthy and prosperous lives. Recognising education as a fundamental human right, the
United Nations concentrated on improving access to and quality of education both in the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and in its post-2015 agenda via the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs). When formulating the MDGs, United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) defined MDG number 2 as “Achieve universal primary education”. The
target was specified as, by 2015, ensuring that all children complete primary school education.7
Despite all the efforts, this target was not completely accomplished. While the target was to
ensure that all children complete primary education, the number of out-of-school children were
only halved from 2000 to 2015, and, as of 2015, 57 million school-age children were still not
enrolled in school.8 Going from the MDGs to the SDGs, a more comprehensive goal on education
namely Goal 4 – Quality Education has been targeted in the post-2015 agenda. While access to
primary education and successful completion are still goals, the SDGs also incorporate quality,
equality, and pre-primary education as areas of focus.9 However, even though great attention
has been drawn to the social and economic returns of educational investments, progress in
attainment in education seems to be stagnant, and challenges such as access to education,
inequity, gender inequality, and quality education still remain.
Poor educational attainment and poverty reinforce one another. A low level of education
increases the likelihood of being poor. A recent report by UNICEF shows a negative correlation
between average years of education for adults aged 25-34 in a country and percentage of people
living under 2$ a day poverty line with poverty rate decreasing by 9 percent for each additional
year of schooling.10 In the same vein UNESCO (2014a) calculates that if all children in low-
income countries learned basic reading skills when they are leaving school 171 million fewer
people would live under 1.25$ a day poverty line which is a 12 percent decrease in world
poverty. While this is the case when children are born into poor families they generally start
their lives at a disadvantage. On a global level, average results show that playing field is tilted in
favour of richer children. On average 76 percent of the poorest children of primary or lower
secondary school age go to school as opposed to 93 percent of the richest children. 11 Moreover,
children of wealthier families are more likely to complete more quality and higher level of
schooling whereas children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to leave
6 UNESCO (2014b)
7 United Nations (2015a).
8 (United Nations, 2015b)
9 (United Nations, 2016).
10 (UNICEF, 2015)
11 According to the results obtained by Hattori (2014) which uses 63 countries MICS and DHS datasets conducted between
2008 and 2012.