Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
56
with the goal of improving girls’ education outcomes.162 Under the program 62 schools were
constructed in selected villages.163 Yet the improvements in Niger are slim compared to Burkina
Faso. Results suggest that girls’ enrolment increased by 4.3 percentage points but their
attendance rate did not change. Additionally, no increase was observed in boys education
outcomes. The difference between the outcomes observed in Burkina Faso and Niger could be due
to the selection method of the villages that the schools were constructed in. In Burkina Faso these
villages were selected by the Ministry of Education based on a scoring of villages that request a
school. The villages filled in a survey and then the number of children to be served was estimated,
giving higher weight for girls. In Niger on the other hand, the Government of Niger chose villages
again by using certain eligibility criteria and then the villages that were to receive the schools
were selected randomly out of these preselected villages. The different results observed in
Afghanistan, Burkina Faso and Niger suggest that a careful needs assessment might be a better
approach before undertaking construction projects.
Making access to schools easier for children also leads to future improvements for the
communities. In Indonesia, with the fastest primary school construction program in the World,
INPRES, 61,807 schools were constructed between 1973 and 1979.164 An analysis of the impact
of the program on schooling and future wages suggest that an average increase of 0.12 to 0.19
years of schooling and 1.5 to 2.7 percent increase in wages were achieved with each primary
school constructed per 1,000 children.165 In Pakistan, building government girls’ secondary
schools in villages were found to be associated with an increase in private schools in the villages
which is shown to be due to an increase of skilled female labour supply.166 In Pakistan the villages
with a government girls’ secondary school has twice as many educated women compared to
villages without these schools and due to a higher labour supply wages are lower leading to an
easier entry for the private education sector.
Location is not only a problem for rural children but it could also be a problem in other
cases demanding different kinds of solutions. Not only children in rural areas but also children
in urban areas living in slums or children living in other precarious environments are at a
disadvantage in access to schools. In Bangladesh, to make it easier for children living in Dhaka’s
slums to access schools, 120 temporary “Learning Centres” serving 3,000 children have been
established under the IDA financed Reaching Out of School Children Project.167 The project is
planned to serve 50,000 children in the coming years. In Bangladesh again, a community of
800,000 people live on boats on the riverbanks of the country, which makes it difficult for the
children who are part of this community to have access to schools.168 To answer the needs of this
162 Kazianga, Levy, Linden, and Sloan (2013)
163 Dumitrescu, Levy, Orfield, and Sloan (2011)
164 Duflo (2001)
165 Duflo (2001)
166 Andrabi, Das, and Khwaja (2013)
167 Kabir and Parajuli (2016)
168 UNESCO (2010)