Now is the time to extend Support to Students most in Need

This article is part of the World Economic Forum’s Intelligence Map on Sustainable Development, which was co-curated by Southern Voice. Explore the map here. 

Access to education is a basic human right and essential for economic growth, yet it remains unattainable for many children in the Global South. Efforts to address this have had mixed results. While there is improvement in terms of enrolment and retention rate at the primary level, completion of a full 12 years of schooling is still a distant dream for many. An estimated 258 million children around the world are not in school; 97 million of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, and another 94 million in central and South Asia (COVID-19 may have sharply increased these figures). These children are largely disadvantaged; many have disabilities, are members of religious minorities, or are migrants. Girls are particularly vulnerable. While the pandemic has made clearer pre-existing fault lines in the public provisioning of education, it also has created opportunities to build stronger, more inclusive and equitable education systems. There is a need to broaden the understanding of what inclusive education means, particularly in countries where related efforts are only being applied to children with disabilities. Governments should carry out vulnerability mappings on at regular intervals.

Reasons vary widely for the lack of access to education – so one-size-fits-all approaches to policy interventions in the sector have largely failed to translate good public-sector intentions into effective outcomes. It is therefore clear that the entire population of out-of-school children cannot be viewed as a single, homogeneous group. To achieve effective outcomes, it will be necessary to implement needs-based, targeted interventions – especially for those children left furthest behind. It is the right time for administrators to try to draw up inclusive fiscal plans looking ahead for the next five years, and to ramp up investment in a manner that more comprehensively addresses the requirements of vulnerable children. As the pandemic wanes, one immediate policy measure that can be implemented is to support more students using both monetary and non-monetary incentives, especially for those in dire need, to keep them in the system. Ultimately, it must be acknowledged that inclusion is not only an outcome but also a process; for truly inclusive education, the participation of many different stakeholders in this process is imperative.