Crossing Boundaries : Gender, Caste and Schooling in Rural Pakistan
Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent h...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20110628133715 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3475 |
| Summary: | Can communal heterogeneity explain
persistent educational inequities in developing countries?
The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that
explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages
and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that
demand for schooling is sensitive to the allocation of
schools across ethnically fragmented communities. The
analysis focuses on two types of social barriers: stigma
based on caste affiliation and female seclusion that is more
rigidly enforced outside a girl's own hamlet. Results
indicate a substantial decrease in primary school enrollment
rates for girls who have to cross hamlet boundaries to
attend, irrespective of school distance, an effect not
present for boys. However, low-caste children, both boys and
girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient
school is in a hamlet dominated by high-caste households. In
particular, low-caste girls, the most educationally
disadvantaged group, benefit from improved school access
only when the school is also caste-concordant. A policy
experiment indicates that providing schools in low-caste
dominant hamlets would increase overall enrollment by almost
twice as much as a policy of placing a school in every
unserved hamlet, and would do so at one-sixth of the cost. |
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