Access to school

Equity is at the heart of the new global development agenda, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) prioritizing a fair, inclusive world, where futures are not determined by one's wealth, ethnicity, sex, or other socioeconomic factors. This policy brief summarizes EPDC research findings produced under UNICEF's Learning for Peace program. The relationship between education inequalities and violent conflict finds strong empirical support, particularly in the years after 2000.

EPDC recently conducted an analysis of Uganda's Universal Secondary Education (USE) policy, and findings were published in the International Journal of Educational Development. From the abstract: "A general consensus regarding universal schooling policies is that they have boosted enrollments while ignoring the quality of learning, although there is burgeoning research interest in the extent to which such policies have contributed to more equitable educational delivery.

The last decades have seen an impressive growth in school participation in developing countries. As countries have made remarkable progress towards universal primary school completion, the focus in the development community has shifted to reaching the most disadvantaged populations, and improving the quality of education. Is school access truly universal? And now that most children are in school, do we know whether they are actually learning?

This technical paper summarizes the methodology used by EPDC to project key education indicators over time. The EPDC projection model estimates pupil volume based on several key pieces of input information, including the gross intake rate (GIR), and the repetition, dropout, and transition rates. Available historical values on these key indicators are used to estimate trends across time, which are then extrapolated for the period of the projections, following the methods described in the paper.