Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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families with an additional incentive to send their children to school. The school feeding
programme that is being implemented in Senegal emerges as an innovative example.491 Under
this programme, rather than giving ready-made food directly to the schools, the food needs to
be bought from local markets using cash or vouchers that are provided to the schools and
parents are involved in preparing/cooking the food.
2. Alleviate the impact of location as a barrier: Children living in rural areas are generally at
a disadvantage in reaching schools. To solve the problem of distance, more schools could be
built or set up in existing buildings in hard to reach areas. Afghanistan is one of the member
countries that did this through a project applied in one of its provinces by using buildings that
already exist in villages and got positive results, especially with respect to girls’ enrolment.492
Turkey used a different approach and offered free transportation to those children who did
not have access to a school within the vicinity of their households.493 From outside the OIC, an
innovative approach that brought positive results was distributing bicycles in India.494 This
programme was found to lead to improvements in enrolments.
Apart from rural areas, living in slums in urban areas can also be a disadvantage. These areas
could also be prioritized in setting up schools. For instance, in Bangladesh “learning centres”
have been set up in slum areas to make it easier for children living in slums to have access to
schools. 495
3. Alleviate the impact of gender as a barrier: Putting gender equality in education as a
priority in national strategies and plans works well as a first step according to the past
experiences of member countries like Mozambique and Senegal.496 Targeting girls specifically
or having a gender perspective in the programmes applied like prioritizing girls in conditional
cash transfers or making the newly built schools “girl-friendly” was shown to have positive
impact.497
Public awareness campaigns can change the attitudes of families on girls’ education. Turkey
employed a public awareness campaign called “Girls Let’s go to School!” and this campaign
which also included household visits as well as national and local advertisements with public
figures helped in improving girls’ schooling.498
4. Alleviate the impact of disability as a barrier: In order to achieve this, it is important to first
acknowledge that disabled children are having difficulties in accessing schools. This should be
reflected in national planning and in preparing legislation. For instance, Turkey has shown
491 See Senegal case in Chapter 3.
492 Burde and Linden (2013)
493 See Turkey case in Chapter 3.
494 Muralidharan and Prakash (2013)
495 Kabir and Parajuli (2016)
496 UNESCO (2015)
497 See the examples in part “Interventions addressing gender” in Section 1.3.2 for the World and in Section 2.3 for the OIC
countries
498 See Turkey case in Chapter 3 for more details.