Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
187
RECOMMENDATIONS
In the first chapter of this report, a framework was presented for thinking about barriers to
children’s access to quality education. These barriers were identified in the report as poverty,
location, gender, disability, language spoken/ethnicity along with system wide problems that
include financing and quality issues as presented in in Section The report focused on
the ways in which OIC countries are working to address these barriers within their own country
contexts. Examples of these interventions from different parts of the world, from the OIC and
specifically from the case study countries were the focus of previous chapters. This section aims
to distil some of the key messages and recommendations from the implementation of these
programmes.
Improving access to quality education is not an easy challenge but, as presented in the previous
chapters, there have been successes in removing barriers. This section will identify a number of
key interventions that are of particular significance to policymakers in the OIC, paying particular
attention to the importance of country context and the fact that the same policies can have
substantially different results depending on where they are implemented. The key information on
which interventions in the world (Chapter 1), in the OIC (Chapter 2) and more specifically in the
case countries (Chapter 3) have been successful in addressing barriers will be summarized here
and good approaches will be underlined as recommendations for practitioners and policy makers
in member states.
Some of the recommendations that we have compiled after studying the OIC members states and
cases are as follows:
1. Alleviate the impact of poverty as a barrier : The first step in reaching poor children is to
make schools free and so it is vital to begin by abolishing school fees at the primary level. For
instance in Uganda – an OIC country - the elimination of school fees led to significant increases
in access to schooling for poor children. 488 Abolishing school fees may not be enough on its
own to improve poor children’s access to education since other costs such as those of
textbooks, uniforms or transportation may be significant. Hence targeted transfers – similar to
conditional cash transfers (CCTs) - which have been shown to work in increasing access to
schools in different country contexts could be adopted as a solution where poverty remains a
barrier to access.489 However, an intervention in Morocco suggests that even unconditional
cash transfers may work well in improving educational outcomes with the added benefit that
they are less costly to implement since there is no administrative burden for checking who
meets the conditions.490
Providing children school meals could improve the demand for schools as well. School meals
provide poor children with nutritional support that they may be lacking at home and provide
488 Bertoncino, Murphy, and Wang (2002)
489 See the examples in part “Interventions addressing poverty” in Section 1.3.2 for the World and in Section 2.3 for the OIC
countries.
490 Benhassine, Devoto, Duflo, Dupas, and Pouliquen (2015)