Out-of-school-children

Introduction

Primary education is a fundamental human right and one of the most crucial factors for human development, but despite the efforts and progress from local governments as well as international bodies like UNICEF, about 258 million children, adolescents and youth of primary and secondary school-age are still out of school for the year ending in 2018. If the current trend continues millions of children around the world will never be able to set their foot in a classroom.

Definition

The term "out-of-school children" defines the population between the ages of 6-15 years who do not attend schools, who have studied in schools but dropped out before completing their compulsory or basic education, whose entry to schools is likely to be delayed because of financial or domestic reasons or those who are unlikely to ever attend.

Purpose

By carrying out this project, the aim is to dive deep into data and reveal who the out-of-school children are, where they live, what are the primary challenges they face and what strategies must be adopted to overcome those challenges.

Analysis

In this section, we explore and find patterns from the rich set of data downloaded from reliable public sources like World Bank and UNESCO Institute of Statistics.

Global trend over time

We first analyse out-of-school children's trend over time, (both in terms of their absolute values and percentages) to get a bird's eye view about whether the situation is improving or deteriorating over time. From graph below, we observe that from 1970-2019 there is a decreasing trend, indicating that countries overall have managed to enroll millions of additional children in primary education system over the past 5 decades.

Gender Disparity

Next, we break down our data with respect to gender. As indicated in previous graph, values for girls and boys both are decreasing with time but out-of-school rates for girls are still higher than those of boys throughout the timeline, indicating that gender disparity exists. The gap between out-of-school rates of girls and boys has narrowed steadily since 2000, but even this trend has slowed in recent years. Another thing to note here is that rate of decline for boys is not as sharp as that of girls during the past 50 years.

Another insight that the chart above provides is that the majority out-of-school children population (more than half) is comprised of girls. Around the world, 132 million girls are out of school, including 34.3 million of primary school age, 30 million of lower-secondary school age, and 67.4 million of upper-secondary school age. In countries affected by conflict, girls are more than twice as likely to be out of school than girls living in non-affected countries.

Given below are the top causes leading girls to persistent exclusion from school. It turns out that the two most crucial factors to girl's education are poverty and early marriages. According to one UNICEF estimate, only 49 of 155 countries have dedicated policies to allow pregnant girls and young mothers to continue their education.

Regional Disparity

Now lets take a look at geographical data and see which of the developing countries have the highest rates of out-of-school children. By dividing the data according to urban and rural population, we can easily identify that as per year 2018, Africa contains the highest rates for out-of-school children in the whole world. From map chart comparison below between urban and rural regions, rural regions on average tend to have far worse rates than urban regions. In many developing countries, resources are skewed in the opposite way, with more resources for the most advantaged: urban, more affluent areas receiving more funding per student than poorer, rural areas.

If we further breakdown this geographical data into different regions, we see that Africa, Central/South Asia and Oceana and have some of the most alarming rates for out-of-school children. Four countries, Mauritania, South Sudan, Niger and Mali, account for three-fifth of the out-of-school population in Sub-saharan Africa. Sudan, Yemen and Iraq account for a significant proportion of out-of-school children in Northen Africa and Western Asia. In South Asia, Pakistan (Urban population) alone accounts for more than one-half of the out-of-school children in the region, while Afghanistan (Rural population) also has a large number and proportion of out-of-school children according to household survey data.

Poverty

Africa and Asia are the two most economically challenged continents on the globe of the world, so in this section we will focus on those countries that have highest rates both in poverty and out-of-school children. Interestingly, the countries that stood out in the previous two graphs above, also happen to be the ones with highest poverty rates forcing children in to child labor. Time and time again, poverty and rural location have been linked to persistent obstacles to education, despite the fact that a multitude of countries have built more schools and abolished school fees.

The correlation between poverty and school non-participation is most evident in Asian countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and African countries like Sudan, Chad, Mauritania etc. An important insight is the way that poverty interacts with other factors of exclusion, like war, conflict or natural disaster, to intensify disadvantage which we are going to discuss in the next section.

Conflict

According to UNICEF report, nearly a quarter of world's children live in conflict or disaster-stricken countries, without access to quality education. One of the most adverse effects of these conflicts is that education systems are destroyed. Even in places where educational institutions might be found, children getting exposed to violence are more at risk of under-achieving or dropping-out. These are a few numbers for some of the worst war-affected countries:

Two in five schools in Syria has been damaged or destroyed. Over 2 million children – over one-third of Syria’s child population - is out-of-school and 1.3 million children are at risk of dropping out. One in eight children per classroom requires specialized psychosocial support.
In Afghanistan, nearly half of primary-aged children are out of school.
In Yemen, nearly 10 million children are affected by the conflict.
In South Sudan, 59 per cent of primary-aged children are out of school and 1 in 3 schools is closed in conflict affected areas.

Key Findings

From analysis and visualizations carried above, it is clear that despite an overall decreasing rate for out-of-school children, there are widespread challenges that continue to leave large number of children excluded. The main barriers that continue to hinder children from going to school are:

Poverty: Financial position of a child's family is the biggest hurdle forcing him/her to drop out and become child labor.
Gender Discrimination: Mostly because of cultural or traditional reasons such as bias against educating females, girls are kept out of school hence accounting for low attendance.
Location: Most of out-of-school children belong to rural areas of countries where there are no schools or they are located at far away distances. Even if there are any schools in the vicinity, the quality of education and teachers is not very high.
Resources: In some underdeveloped countries, there simply are not enough schools, teachers and classrooms that can accomodate all children enabling them to go to school.
Conflict: According to UNICEF report published in 2018, one third of global out-of-school children's population belongs to countries affected by war, conflicts or some natural disaster.

Conclusion

After assessing the barriers that prevent children from basic education, following are the key measures that need to be taken on priority level so that no child is left behind:

Schools fees must be abolished (or atleast made affordable) and all necessary support and equipment should be provided to financially challenged children so that they may continue to pursue their education.
Lowering the burden of household responsibilities and discouraging early marriages in the society will help improve the female enrollment in educational institutes.
By making use of technology, children belonging to distant or remote areas can be engaged in active and interactive educational activities and made part of mainstream educational system.
Local governments as well as international bodies and practitioners must direct their investments on making strategies that leave a lasting impact on the educational needs of out-of-school children.
Natural disasters cannot be avoided but man-made ones surely can be resolved in a peaceful manner without the use of violence and arms. Without support, conflict-affected children lose out on the chance to reach their full potential and rebuild their communities. United Nations and other humanitarian agencies must implement effective measures to protect and educate children living in war zones.
Most important of all, a strong committment and desire is required from grass-root to highest possible levels to implement all recommendations mentioned above.

Global Statistics on Out-of-School Primary Age Children