 |
|
|
SUBSCRIBE
|
|
Your email address:
|
|
|
Children’s educational completion rates and achievement: Implications for Ethiopia’s second Poverty Reduction strategy (2006-10)
2005
Tassew Woldehanna, Nicola Jones, Bekele Tefera
Young Lives
The major development objectives of the Ethiopian Government are to reduce poverty and improve primary school enrolment and educational achievement (SDPRP, 2002). However, education performance indicators show that only access‑related targets have been achieved, while educational quality declined in most respects.
Drawing on a sample of 1,000 children aged 7.5 to 8.5 years old from twenty sentinel sites, the Young Lives project sought to understand the determinants of school completion and achievement at the household, community, regional and national levels across different regions of Ethiopia. The paper identifies the specific factors associated with primary school completion/dropout rates, and educational achievement and performance of children, and assesses the mechanisms through which these factors are influential.
With respect to school completion:
-
Children from families with more household members over 15 years of age are less likely to drop out because there are more people to share the household labour burden.
-
Boys are also less likely to drop out than girls, although recent legislative changes are likely to change this.
-
School availability and quality, aggregate household wealth and indebtedness, and higher levels of parental education are all important determinants of children’s education.
Regarding school achievement:
-
Boys generally perform better overall in terms of aggregate test scores, although the performance of both boys and girls is adversely affected by the pressures on children to contribute to household labour.
-
Children’s positive assessment of school quality and growing community mobilisation efforts around children’s education are reflected in their learning achievements.
-
Parental commitment to, rather than parental levels of, education was more important.
-
Household poverty functioned as a multi‑dimensional barrier to children’s achievement, while stunting significantly affected all indicators of scholastic attainment.
Implications from the research suggest that policy‑makers should:
-
introduce child‑sensitive measures to combat the poverty effect
-
incorporate gender‑specific target indicators at all school levels during the second round of the SDPRP to contribute to gender equality
-
address all aspects of school quality
-
deal sensitively with community mobilisation as it can be burdensome by involving high financial, labour and time inputs from community members
-
extend government efforts to initiate a student‑centred education system
-
pay particular attention to nutrition promotion programmes.
|
|
Download document...
|
|
|
|
| INFORM US |
| Tell us about events relating to social accountability in the region |
|
|
|
|
