Of the 21 million students in public kindergarten, elementary and high schools this year, 7.2 million are children from households benefiting from the conditional cash transfer. Among the conditions for the monthly state dole-outs is for the parents to keep their children in school, so there’s a good chance that those 7.2 million will not be dropping out of school anytime soon.
The cash transfer, however, has limited coverage. With an estimated 20 percent of the population living in extreme poverty and 40 percent below the poverty line, millions of parents will still struggle with the expenses of keeping even one child in school.
Despite free and compulsory universal education from kindergarten to high school, the country continues to see a high dropout rate starting from third grade. The costs of uniforms, school supplies and miscellaneous school fees still constitute a heavy burden for many parents. In several households, children are forced to drop out of school to help parents in farms and other livelihood activities. Some children eventually return to school; many others don’t, and are often compelled to join the informal labor force to help put food on the family table.
Providing free kindergarten is laudable but is an additional strain on the limited national appropriation for education. Parents will also have to set aside their own funds for their children’s kindergarten expenses, in addition to saving up for expenditures in higher grades. The government will have to devise schemes, apart from the cash transfer, to assist parents in keeping children in school, possibly with the assistance of the private sector and multilateral institutions.
Micro-lending schemes for education and entrepreneurship can be developed. Adult literacy programs can also be promoted to inculcate the value of continuing education among parents with limited formal schooling. Like economic growth, education must be sustained. A nation with a high dropout rate, where a broad section of the population is only functionally literate, cannot hope to compete and survive in a globalized environment.