Exploring educational opportunities across neighbourhoods in urban centres: insights from Bangladesh, India, and Tanzania

• In Event: Re-examining educational access and inequality

Proposal

Historically, one of the reasons for rural-to-urban migration included the possibility to access better education services as a way out of poverty and rural labour and towards improved socio-economic prospects (see Browne, 2017). Contemporary rates and styles of urbanisation, however, suggest that the benefits that access to urban educational opportunities used to offer may not continue to materialise for all in the Global South due to the growth of urban sprawl and slums (Osborne & Hernandez, 2020; United Nations, 2020) which puts more pressure on the already overburdened services, including education. The New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat, 2017) thus emphasises the need to maximise the benefits and minimise the harms of rapid and poorly controlled urbanisation by investing in sustainable and inclusive opportunities for all, including (and especially) in education.

However, the lack of reliable and nuanced data on the distribution of opportunities, benefits, and harm within the urban population leads to policies operating at a very general level. This prevents moving towards systematic approaches to address inequalities in education that are customised to local realities and priorities. One reason for the gap in contextualised and localised data is the lack of focus on the full range of neighbourhoods across socio-economic strata (Benwell, 2009), including local structures and opportunities.

This paper is a step towards addressing this gap as it focuses on understanding spatial inequalities and experiences in accessing formal education services. Mindful of the role of neighbourhoods in shaping opportunities and livelihoods and perpetuating inequalities, we studied and compared educational opportunities, facilities, and services in neighbourhoods of different income in Bangladesh, India, and Tanzania.

In particular, we analysed the following aspects of formal education: (a) availability of private and public schools and schools run by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and religious institutions; (b) financial support for those in need and financing of schools; (c) quality of schools as indicated by student-teacher and student-classroom ratios and availability of facilities and services such as classrooms, computers, libraries, electricity, clean water, medical check-ups, hygiene, and others; as well as (d) physical accessibility of schools as assessed by the availability of public/private transport and quality of roads for walking/commuting within and across neighbourhoods for schooling.

This research is part of a large-scale mixed-method study conducted across fourteen cities in seven countries in Africa and Asia. For this presentation, we selected to showcase and compare two cities in each of the three countries: one major national city and one ‘typical’ regional city, which includes Dhaka and Khulna in Bangladesh, Delhi and Madurai in India, and Dar es Salam and Dodoma in Tanzania respectively. The research was conducted by project partners in different types of neighbourhoods in each country, including ultra-poor (in Dhaka, Delhi, and Dodoma), low-income, lower middle-income, middle-income, upper middle-income, high-income, and mixed income.

The research relied on a combination of three methods: (1) analysis of education data sets from national level down to the lowest level of aggregation such as a ward, where possible; (2) informal ‘go along’ interviews with key stakeholders and residents in each neighbourhood; and (3) systematic auditing of built environment and service provision at neighbourhood level to evaluate availability and accessibility of educational institutions.

Cities under study – especially Dhaka, Delhi, and Dar es Salam – have some of the best education facilities in the country. Yet, findings show that, as they are characterised by extreme inequalities, availability, accessibility, and quality of schools vary significantly across neighbourhoods, and infrastructure, the built environment, and local interventions sustain spatial segregation. There is no doubt that ultra-poor, low, and low-income neighbourhoods struggle the most in terms of accessing all levels of state-funded education, and often depend on free of charge schools run by NGOs and religious institutions that tend to be under-resourced and have unsustainable funding. It is thus children from these neighbourhoods who miss on the benefits formal education can offer – a situation that contributes to trapping many residents in the cycle of poverty and low socio-economic conditions. However, neighbourhoods from middle income to high income face a range of challenges, too. While children in such neighbourhoods may generally have access to better-resourced and higher achieving state schools, some of such areas have poor availability of schools, old and unsafe classrooms and buildings, and other issues, and increasingly rely on private schools inside and outside their neighbourhoods that people living in poorer clusters cannot afford.

Authors

• Yulia Nesterova, University of Glasgow

• Michele Schweisfurth, University of Glasgow