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600 million children are illiterate. 1

As shocking as this statistic is, it also seems somewhat unavoidable. After all, the factors that we assume are the main causes of illiteracy – from wars, to child labor, to a lack of schools – are deeply rooted, and fixing them would require first eliminating poverty and creating world peace. Given the immense difficulty of these two tasks, it seems that child education must be relegated to the heap of issues that cannot be resolved in the near future. However, our assumptions about child illiteracy are deeply inaccurate. In fact, two-thirds of illiterate children actually attend school. As damaging as war and child labor are, they are only responsible for roughly 33% of child illiteracy globally. 2 This has remarkable implications for how we think about educational improvement and reform worldwide; perhaps the factors impeding literacy are much less impassable than previously thought. This article will explore four possible explanations for what actually causes illiteracy and show that the main factors hindering education in developing countries are low-quality teaching, student illness, and malnutrition. Furthermore, there are affordable, sustainable solutions to these problems, especially malnutrition.

Niger has the highest Child Illiteracy Rate in the World: 76% (UNICEF)* 

What Causes Child Illiteracy?

One intuitive reason for child illiteracy could be that schools simply do not have the supplies and materials – from books to whiteboards to pencils – to be able to educate their students. However, innovative experiments conducted in several East African states show that this is actually not a common reason for poor education levels. 3 Researchers randomly selected a number of schools in Kenya and distributed textbooks to them. However, the schools that received textbooks saw only marginal improvements in student performance, and no improvement in the test results of the weakest students. Because textbooks are only useful to students who can already read, they are not a very effective way to improve literacy rates. Similar experiments have shown that a lack of other materials, such as flipcharts, also cannot explain the high illiteracy rates across schools in developing countries.

One common weakness of the education systems of developing countries is often the lack of training and professionalism of their teachers. Without sufficient funds for education, developing countries struggle to provide high-quality teacher training; studies have found that in several sub-Saharan African countries, teachers can rarely score much better than their best grade 6 students. 4 Furthermore, the incentives for teachers are weak: teachers in India have an absenteeism rate of nearly  25%. 5 Combined with high student-teacher ratios, this leads to a low quality of teaching across many developing countries and contributes to poor education outcomes. These problems have been consistent and difficult to resolve, as training is costly and implementing more rigorous incentive and disciplinary structures is often opposed by teachers’ unions.

Furthermore, students may fail to learn because high levels of sickness prevent them from focusing and cause high levels of absences. For example, intestinal worms are highly prevalent worldwide and especially in developing countries with low-quality sanitation systems, infecting over 65% of children in some countries. 6 Children infected with these parasites experience increased fatigue and illness, among other symptoms. This leads both to higher rates of absences from school – which are notoriously high in many developing regions – but also hinder children’s ability to stay attentive in class and learn. This negative effect was quantified by Harvard development economists Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer. Their 2004 study of Kenyan schools showed that providing antiparasitic medicines to children decreased absenteeism by 7% and in the long run led to 20% higher incomes. 7,8 Their study highlights the detrimental impact of just one health issue. However, it also points to solutions, and the NGO inspired by their work now provides antiparasitic pills to over 200 million students in 4 countries. 9 Given that these medicines only cost 0.50 US Dollars per student each year, this exciting, cutting-edge work provides significant hope for the future of education in developing countries.

Similarly, widespread malnutrition hinders children in developing countries around the world from achieving their full potential. Studies have found that 158 million children under the age of five experience stunted growth due to malnutrition. 10 69% of children surveyed in a study in India had anemia, which hinders cognitive development and can be caused by infection or malnutrition. Providing deworming treatments and iron supplements reduced absenteeism by 5.8% at these schools 11 ; however, the root causes of anemia likely have deeper roots stemming from a lack of nutritious food. With less than 10% of children worldwide consuming the recommended quantity of vegetables, the problem of malnutrition extends far beyond less-developed countries. 12 While solutions like iron supplements have been attempted and have shown to be successful in improving learning outcomes, distributing pills to hundreds of millions of children in remote locations worldwide is logistically complex and potentially cost-prohibitive.

Finding ways to holistically and sustainably improve child nutrition has to be a top priority in education development.

Children with Deworming Pills Provided by Evidence Action**

What solutions are there?

Even in the brief overview captured here, a whole range of problems afflicting education systems in rural areas has surfaced. Although all of these problems merit attention, a particularly interesting question is which cost-effective, sustainable, and holistic solutions exist that could make a wide-ranging impact on improving education outcomes in rural areas today.

Solutions to the problem of poorly-trained teachers, unfortunately, are rarely both cheap and practical. The most straightforward way to solve this problem, quite simply, is to establish better training colleges and improve existing institutions – but this is often cost-prohibitive for developing countries. Improving incentives for teachers might seem more practical – providing small bonuses for student performance, for example – but these adjustments are often opposed by politically powerful teachers’ unions. Innovative solutions have been proposed by organizations such as the Akshar Foundation in India, which supplements regular teaching with student-led, one-to-one tutoring and digital learning technologies. 13 These pioneering initiatives have shown great promise but have tended to expand slowly.

Problems of nutrition and disease are self-reinforcing, and proposed solutions to these problems have also tended to be intertwined. Some of the most common remedies, as mentioned above, include widespread distribution of pills meant to combat intestinal worms or supplement iron or vitamin deficiencies. These programs have had a substantial impact, with the Kenyan deworming study leading to long-run increases in income of 20%. 8 However, trying to completely resolve malnutrition and illness through supplements is logistically impractical, expensive, and potentially unsustainable in the face of shifting commitments from donors.

While this may play a role in improving education systems, it would be preferable to address the root cause of malnutrition by advocating and supporting holistic consumption of nutritious foods. Education organizations worldwide are working to increase awareness about nutrition and support sustainable plans for improving schoolchildren’s diets. These programs have shown promise: one study that provided nutritional counseling for students in Ludhiana City, India, saw improved nutrition and the number of female students in the high-performance category nearly doubled. 14 As demonstrated, these programs are immensely important in the bigger picture of improving child literacy worldwide. Sustainable, holistic, and scalable solutions to child nutrition may prove the key to reducing the shockingly high proportion of children who remain illiterate and whose economic and social prospects are hampered by the inaccessibility of basic education.

IIRR Philippines: Gearing towards sustainable nutrition amidst challenges (GSWO)

One of IIRR’s current projects, GSWO, tackles the child malnutrition crisis by providing training and support for school vegetable gardens in the Philippines. This program helps children to develop gardening skills, learn about the importance of good nutrition, and provides seedlings used by schools to grow indigenous vegetables that are climate-resilient and nutritious. So far, the project has supported nearly 600 schools, and it is hoped that this can lead to widespread, sustainable growth in good nutritious practices for schoolchildren and that, eventually, children can spread these practices to the communities in which they live. For more information about children’s education, visit www.unicef.org. And for more on IIRR’s work in nutrition and education, visit the “Our Focus” section of our website at https://iirr.org/our-focus/


Sources

  1. UNICEF,
    https://www.unicef.org/education#:~:text=Over%20600%20million%20children%20worldwide,of%20education%20for%20various%20reasons
  2. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/children-in-the-world-by-country
  3. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/publications/faculty-working-papers/149.pdf Glewwe Kremer Moulin 2007
  4. World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/too-many-teachers-go-it-alone-against-the-worldwide-learning-crisis/
  5. Muralidharan et al. 2017
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272716301621
  6. Fauzieh https://www.mdpi.com/2414-6366/7/11/371
  7. Miguel and Kremer 2004
  8. Harmory et al. 2021
  9. https://www.evidenceaction.org/programs/deworm-the-world
  10. Ojo, 2022
  11. (Bobonis et al., 2014)
  12. (Kreb-Smith et al., 2010)
  13. Akshar Foundation
  14. Paramjit K.C and Sharma .S. (2007). Nutritional Status and Mental Ability of School Girls (7-9 years) as Influenced by Nutrition Counselling Journal of Human Ecology. Vol.12 165-169.
  15. UNICEF: https://www.unicef.org/eca/press-releases/3-10-young-people-conflict-or-disaster-stricken-countries-are-illiterate#:~:text=Niger%2C%20Chad%2C%20South%20Sudan%20and,unable%20to%20read%20or%20write
  16. 95% of illiterate people live in developing countries:
    https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/313651468741665795/pdf/wps3496.pdf

Photo Credits

* https://www.borgenmagazine.com/education-niger/

** https://www.evidenceaction.org/programs/deworm-the-world

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