Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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ANNEXES
ANNEX 1: HUMAN OPPORTUNITY INDEX (HOI) CALCULATIONS
Inequalities prevent children from having the same opportunities in life. Basic services may fail
to cover every child and generally the children that are excluded are not random. Personal
circumstances that the children have no control over might put children at a disadvantage in life
starting from the time that they were born.
HOI was initially constructed by the World Bank in the study by Barros and others (2009) to
measure inequality of opportunities for children in Latin America. So far it has been used in other
multi-country studies including South Asia (Rama et al, 2015), Africa (Dabalen et al, 2015) and
also for single countries including Pakistan (Newman, 2012) and Egypt (Aran and Ersado, 2013).
In this report opportunities related to education are examined. The specific indicators that are
used throughout every case study are i) attendance in school of 6-11 year olds, ii) attendance in
school of 12-15 year olds, iii) finishing 5 years of education for 12-15 year olds, iv) finishing 8
years of education for 16-18 year olds. And the circumstances that children have no control on
are taken as location of the household, region of the household, ethnicity/language (when
available)513, gender of the child, education level of the household head and household wealth.
Human Opportunity Index (HOI) is a synthetic index that measures coverage of a service and
penalizes it for systematic inequalities in between predefined groups. Hence HOI shows if the
playing field is tilted for the children from the beginning or not.
HOI is measured simply by multiplying the average coverage rate of a service with an index to
measure penalty in case there are inequalities in access in between groups.
=̅ (1 − )
In the equation above ̅ is the average coverage rate of the service and D is the dissimilarity
index that measures the inequality of opportunity. D takes a value of 0 if the services are
distributed equally in which case HOI will be equal to the average coverage rate ̅. Dissimilarity
index D is calculated using the equation below:
=
1
2̅
∑ |̅ − |
=1
Here i is the specific circumstance group and is the coverage of that group. denotes the
share of that group in total population of children and m is the total number of circumstance
groups.
513 Ethnicity and/or language is not reported for children but instead reported for women answering the women’s
questionnaire of DHS. When there are more than 1 woman in a household answering this questionnaire, the mode is taken.
Hence this variable proxies the household ethnicity/language.