Who fails to attend pre-primary education? A global analysis of SDG4.2.2 from 2010 to 2015

• In Event: The Equity Initiative: Expanding Access to Quality Pre-Primary Education Opportunities: Using Data and Research to Document Inequity

Proposal

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2 envisages that all girls and boys have access to quality childhood development, care and pre-primary education by 2030. While UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) provides data on enrolment among children one year before the official primary entry age (SDG4.2.2), the data does not allow detailed disaggregation by critical dimensions for equity analysis including sex, place of residence, Socio-Economic Status (SES) and other family characteristics that may have a profound impact on children’s likelihood of attending pre-primary education. While other data sets, such as the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), provide education data from 163 countries with detailed disaggregation by gender, place of residence, region, wealth, ethnicity and religion, different definitions of access to pre-primary education makes it difficult to aggregate data sources. For example, in WIDE, the indicator is defined as “Percentage of 3 to 4-year-old attending any type of pre-primary education program” which does not align to the recent SDG4.2 indicator, which is the participation rate in organized learning one year prior to enrollment in primary school.
The MICS survey, conducted by UNICEF, addresses data on children and families through the national administration of household surveys. The MICS team recently decided to expand its global education database to cover the attendance of children one year before primary education, to meet the data monitoring needs in the context of SDG4 and to fill the above-mentioned global data gap in access to pre-primary education with an equity focus. This paper will report on new data on pre-primary enrollment, produced by incorporating data from the Multi-Cluster Indicator Surveys (MICS) and Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) from 2010 to 2015. Results from these analyses will be presented, including (1) the global picture of access to preprimary education, disaggregated by key equity stratifications, and (2) a trend analysis of access to preprimary education since 2010 using descriptive statistics. The association between attending pre-primary education and individual and household characteristics will reported, to show the global patterns in child and family characteristics and associations with likelihood of attending pre-primary education. Findings from this study generate evidence of inequity in access to pre-primary education for global advocacy, discussion, and prioritization of strategies to improve equity in access. Findings will also help identify the influence of family and child background on access to pre-primary education, a key consideration in outlining patterns of equity in access to pre-primary education.

Author

• Suguru Mizunoya, UNICEF