Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
45
languages are spoken in the country and among the test takers 33 percent of the children did not
speak the test language at home before starting school.134 4th grade students in a small number of
member countries are at a disadvantage in achievement in mathematics also depending on what
language they speak at home Panel B). The gap between speakers and non-speakers of
the dominant language is the widest for children in Iran and Turkey. For these countries the gaps
are 29.6 and 29.1 percentage points respectively.
Apart from minority populations, refugee children are another group that suffer from
problems related to language in the host countries. The top 3 countries sending the largest
number of refugees in the World are Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria and they are all OIC member
countries.135 Among the top 6 countries receiving the largest number of refugees 5 of them are
also OIC member countries namely Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran and Jordan.136 For instance in
Lebanon the medium of instruction is English and French along with Arabic in public schools and
in Turkey it is Turkish. This poses a problem for Syrian children who used to being educated in
Arabic in their home country.
In some member countries in the Africa region, more systematic problems might be
affecting student achievement despite the changes in the language of instruction. According
to the reading achievement tests conducted in primary school, in Mali 94 percent of grade 2
students could not read a single word of French in schools where the medium of instruction is
French.137 When the test is conducted in Bamanakan in schools where the medium of instruction
is Bamanakan, this rate was found to be 83 percent. This was also the case for other national
instruction languages in the country (Bomu, Fulfulde, Songhoi). Similarly in Uganda 53 percent of
children in schools with English as the language of instruction and 51 percent of students with
Luganda as the language of instruction were still not able to read by the end of the 2nd grade.138
These findings point out to the fact that in some cases changing the medium of instruction to the
mother tongue alone might not be enough to achieve the intended results.
System wide problems
Education is not a priority in many of the OIC member countries’ budgets. Only close to half
of the OIC countries with data available (22 out of 48) spend more than 15 percent of their
government budgets on education as is recommended (Se .139 Only 5 countries spend
more than 20 percent of their budgets on education, namely Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire,
Niger and Senegal. Senegal, which is a low-income country, is the country spending the most of its
government budget on educationwith 24.8 percent in 2014. In fact, overall, low and lower middle-
134 Simons and Fennig (2017) for the number of languages spoken and Mullis, Martin, Foy, and Drucker (2012) for the percent
of children not speaking the test language at home.
135 UNHCR (2016)
136 UNHCR (2016)
137 Gove and Cvelich (2010)
138 Gove and Cvelich (2010)
139 As a result of their 2007 meeting in Dakar, The High Level Group on Education for All, a group that is composed of high-level
representatives from national governments, development agencies, UN agencies and the private sector, agreed that between 15
percent and 20 percent of government budgets should be allocated to education (UNESCO, 2007b).