Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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lower access to quality education as evidenced by their scores on international
assessment tests compared to their richer counterparts. On average poor children score
less in participating member countries in PIRLS and TIMSS compared to rich children.
 Living in rural areas also puts children at a disadvantage but the number of
countries with wide urban-rural gaps are smaller than the number of countries
with wide poor-rich gaps. In 18 countries (out of 43) the primary net attendance gap
between children living in rural and urban areas is larger than 10 percentage points and
in 9 of them this gap is greater than 20 percentage points in favor of the children living in
urban areas. Children living in rural areas are more disadvantaged in their access to lower
secondary education. They are also at a disadvantage in access to quality education as
evidenced by their scores in international assessment tests. While on average children
living in rural areas score less than children living in urban areas, the gaps are not as wide
as the gaps between rich and poor children.
 Large gaps in access to education between poor and rich children or children living
in rural and urban areas do not seem to exist between girls and boys, at least in
most of the member countries. The largest gap between boys and girls is observed in
Afghanistan where 43.7 percent of girls of primary school age attend primary school as
opposed to 58.7 percent of boys. Rather than gender alone, gender together with poverty
is a more important predictor of lack of access to education. In fact gender parity in access
to primary education turns out to be a problem mainly for poor children. The gender
parity index for the primary net attendance rate for poor children is less than 0.9 for 14
countries (out of 42), while for rich children this is the case only for 3 countries.
 According to the desk review results disabled children are at a disadvantage in
access to education. In countries like Sudan, Chad and Indonesia, disabled children were
found to be more likely to be out of school compared to their counterparts without a
disability. Furthermore disability type also affects access.
 Children not speaking the language of instruction in the country are also found to
be disadvantaged in access to education. An analysis of DHS surveys for 23 countries
including a number in the OIC shows that even controlling for socioeconomic background,
gender of the child and urban status, language continues to determine children’s
attendance in school in these countries.510
 Apart fromthese barriers, low levels of financing and lowquality education prevent
children from accessing schooling and learning what they are supposed to.
Education is not a priority in most member countries’ budgets. Teacher shortages,
teachers’ levels of education and their absence from the classrooms are problems seen in
510 Smits, Huisman, & Kruijff (2008)