The goal of universal primary school access and completion will not be reached by 2015 if present trends continue. Yet this goal is critical to the elimination of poverty and to enable all people to live in dignity. It is important to focus efforts on how to reach the more than 100 million school-age children still not in primary school. Earlier studies have shown that these out-of-school children are disproportionately girls that they are from rural areas, and from poor households. This EQUIP2/EPDC study examines two new significant aspects of this population:
• What is the sub-national distribution of education inequality?
• Does the overall development context within sub-national regions affect attendance levels?
The study includes a limited number of countries, but the results are suggestive. In countries with low national attendance rates, there is great regional disparity – some areas with high and some areas with very low attendance rates. To attain universal education, the national education policy must focus on these underserved sub-national regions. Second, in most cases, within the sub-national regions, low attendance rates correlate with low overall development. However, there are a few important exceptions, most notably Bangladesh, where most children are in school in all regions of the country, even in the least developed regions. Bangladesh, where there is high education everywhere even in the regions with the lowest development, should be studied as a model for good practice.