Disability and school attendance in 15 low- and middle-income countries

Out of school children are a critical issue in education and development. Very little is known as to whether a disability is associated with a higher risk of being out of school for children in developing countries. This paper presents and analyzes the gap in enrolment in both primary and secondary education between children with and without disabilities using for the first time an internationally tested and comparable measure of functional difficulties (e.g. seeing, hearing, and walking). Using nationally representative datasets from 15 developing countries, this paper finds a consistent and statistically significant disability gap in both primary and secondary school attendance. The paper econometrically examines potential explanations for this disability gap using several specifications. A household fixed effect model shows that disability reduces the probability of school attendance by a median 30.9 percentage points, and that neither individual characteristics nor their socio-economic and unobserved household characteristics explain the disability gap. While general poverty reduction policies through for instance social transfers to the poor may improve school attendance in general, they seem unlikely to close the disability gap in schooling. The disability gap for primary-age children follows an inverted U-shape relationship with GNI per capita. This suggests that, as GNI per capita rises and more resources become available for improving access to education in middle-income countries, children without disabilities increasingly attend school, whereas the situation of children with disabilities may improve more slowly. Despite the adoption of an inclusive education agenda globally, this paper shows that more research and policy attention is needed to make schooling disability-inclusive in developing countries. More attention is also necessary regarding the functional difficulties experienced by children, as some may be preventable and the schooling inequalities associated with them may thus be avoidable.