Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
19
1.3 POLICIES AND STRATEGIES RELATED TO EDUCATION IN THE WORLD
Various interventions are being introduced around the world in order to accomplish the
global targets in access to “quality” education. These programmes often try to provide a
solution to the problems which occur as a result of poverty, distance/location, language, gender
and disabilities discussed in the previous section. Although the scope and impact of these
interventions differ, in many cases they focus on a specific matter such as school attendance or
educational outcomes. That is because even though they aim to address a larger set of problems,
they commonly only impact one of the targeted issues. Since these interventions usually take
place in areas with certain levels of disadvantage it would be an over-expectation to wait for an
all-round response shaped out of one programme.
The following part of this section will provide a set of interventions and best practices from all
over the world that address the issues raised in the previous section (see above Bottleneck
and barriers in access).
Interventions addressing poverty
A number of interventions improve access to education for poor children. Making schools
free, providing cash transfers (conditional or unconditional) and school feeding programs are
among such interventions. School fee abolition has been adopted in a number of countries in
recent decades and has led to increases in enrolment rates in Sub-Saharan Africa.76
Conditional cash transfers are a preferred way to provide financial support directly to
households, mothers or children in order to achieve a certain goal. In cases where families
do not have the necessary financial means and motivation, providing a financial transfer on
condition that the children go to school is a meaningful incentive for school attendance and has
met with great success.77 A comprehensive systematic review carried out by 3ie (Birte Snilstveit
et al., 2016) shows that while cash transfers, especially when they are conditional on specific
behaviours such as attending school, are among the most preferred and useful ways to increase
school participation, they are not found to be effective in general on learning outcomes7879.
School feeding programmes were also found to have positive impact on school
participation.80 School feeding programmes are useful in providing children a nutritional
support as well as working as a safety net for the risk of school drop-out in times of financial
hardship of the households and they create incentives for poor households to send their children
to school. These programmes are implemented by World Food Programme or the government
in many countries around the World yet with varying coverages. Throughout the world at least
368 million children of pre-primary to upper secondary school age are estimated to be covered
by school feeding programmes.81 Yet not all children in the world receive food at school and the
76 (UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) & UNICEF, 2015)
77 (Akresh, De Walque, & Kazianga, 2013; Birte Snilstveit et al., 2016).
78 (Birte Snilstveit et al., 2016)
79 (Evans & Popova, 2015b; Glewwe & Muralidharan, 2015)
80 (Birte Snilstveit et al., 2016)
81 (WFP, 2013)