Research shows that pre-primary education is critical for setting strong foundations for a child’s social, emotional and overall well-being. The early years of a child’s life build the basis for lifelong growth and children who fall behind in these early years often never catch up with their peers, leaving these children more vulnerable to underachievement and dropping out of school.
Access to pre-primary education has increased globally but many children are yet to access it
Access to pre-primary education has almost doubled over the past 20 years. Despite this progress, more than 175 million children – or half of the pre-primary aged children globally – do not have access to this important experience. On a global scale, gender disparity is low, but wealth and location have a big influence on access. This means that both, boys and girls have roughly equal access, but children from rural areas, families with low socioeconomic status and less-developed regions experience higher barriers to appropriate education. In sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, access to pre-primary education for children from the poorest families is less than half as compared to children from the wealthiest families.
Evidence suggests that across the world there are pockets with particularly low access
Globally, the gross enrolment rate increased by only 13 per cent in the last 18 years, from 26 per cent in 2000 to 49 per cent in 2018. Children in South Asia, West and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and Eastern and Southern Africa have particularly low access to pre-primary education. In these regions, only about one-third of pre-primary age children have access to school. It should be noted that gross enrolment ratio looks at children attending a level with no limit on age, therefore any child of any age attending pre-primary is counted as attending pre-primary education in the figure below.
Among children one year younger than the primary school entry age, more than one-third are excluded from pre-primary or primary education today. The number of out-of-school children in this age group decreased from 51 million in 2010 to 48 million in 2013, but has stagnated since 2014 at around 47 million children.
Socio-economic factors play a large role in determining access to pre-primary education
The figure below shows adjusted net attendance rate at the global level by sex, location and wealth. It is evident that location and wealth have the biggest gap at the global level, similar to the discussion above. These are especially apparent in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
In Latin America and the Caribbean as well as East Asia and the Pacific, more than 90 per cent of children have access to pre-primary or primary education at the age of 5. Their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa and West and Central Africa are much less likely to attend, with only half accessing pre-primary or primary education.
Across all regions, fewer rural children have access to pre-primary education. Moreover, there are huge regional variations in access gaps. In Latin America and Caribbean, and East Asia and Pacific, the gap favours urban areas by only 3 per cent, while in West and Central Africa and Eastern and Southern Africa, the gap favours urban children by more than 20 per cent.
Data on wealth and school attendance one year before primary entry age show the largest divides in favor of the more privileged. This translates to the fact that across the world disadvantaged children are less likely to benefit from pre-primary education. Regional disaggregation of these data provides even more insights. For example, children from the poorest quintile in West Africa access pre-primary education at just a third of the rate of their peers from the richest quintile.
Subnational disparities are also extremely wide in many countries, compounding global regional inequalities. For instance, in Nigeria, the difference between the regions with the highest and lowest access is 80 percentage points.
Subnational dispararities of adjusted net attendance rate, one year before primary entry age, Nigeria, 2016
